I kind of expected this. The company didn’t choose to be dicks about it in the first place, and it’s not like Benchy was even a commercial product to begin with. It was cutesy branding that only had a no-derivatives license because the original author was concerned about preserving its utility as a benchmark. But md5 will already do that particular trick if it’s really necessary.
The new owner gained nothing by keeping the more stringent license, and had more to gain in goodwill by releasing it to the public domain.
That, and the inevitable avalanche of community recreations of the basic shape that followed threatened to doom the original to irrelevance anyway.
Trying to tell 3D printing and CAD nerds you can’t make [object] is a fool’s errand, because enough people with time on their hands will just reverse engineer your [object], possibly improve upon it in the process, and post it everywhere to be given away.
I kind of expected this. The company didn’t choose to be dicks about it in the first place, and it’s not like Benchy was even a commercial product to begin with. It was cutesy branding that only had a no-derivatives license because the original author was concerned about preserving its utility as a benchmark. But md5 will already do that particular trick if it’s really necessary.
The new owner gained nothing by keeping the more stringent license, and had more to gain in goodwill by releasing it to the public domain.
That, and the inevitable avalanche of community recreations of the basic shape that followed threatened to doom the original to irrelevance anyway.
Trying to tell 3D printing and CAD nerds you can’t make [object] is a fool’s errand, because enough people with time on their hands will just reverse engineer your [object], possibly improve upon it in the process, and post it everywhere to be given away.