For the last two weeks Thingiverse has been in stealth mode. Zach Hoeken and I schemed it up and he’s been coding like crazy to bring it to life. Invite your friends to the thingiverse and share the universe of things with folks you know!
Fred over at Creative Commons wrote up a very nice article about Thingiverse!
Thingiverse is an “object sharing” site that enables anyone to upload the schematics, designs, and images for their projects. Users can then download and reuse the work in their projects using their own laser cutters, 3D printers, and analog tools. Think of it as a Flickr for the Maker set.
Besides implementing our licenses, Bre and Zach have also gone the distance and allowed users to license works under the GNU GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, as well as allowing them to release works into the public domain. Thingiverse uses our license wrappers for each of these licenses thereby enabling automatic indexing by machines like search engines.
Pushing the envelope even further, Thingiverse also fully implements our RDFa specification (just take a look at the source of any page with a CC license to see RDFa in action) for expressing licensing and authorship information on the semantic web. This means that aside from telling machines that a work is licensed under CC, Thingiverse also tells machines the title of a work, its author, and other interesting semantic information.
If you’re looking for a fantastic example of how to implement the commons on a platform designed for sharing creativity, look no further than Thingiverse.
Thanks Fred! We’ll keep doing our best to make this a great place to share things!