Yes - you’re right.
Another example:
It is not apparent that this extension costs anything!
This is not about a plugin, but about the wrong representation in the EW
my comments aren’t aimed at you, but at the current format that is open to exploitation…
I actually agree that it should be possible for developers to easily mark extensions as commercial…
SU has decided developers don’t have to pay for advertising on EW if they make the sale elsewhere…
fine, that’s their call, I think they should review that decision…
Commercial >> Offsite should be a separate category…
john
2 Likes
This ‘free is not free’ issue has been reported for some time.
UPDATE #2! Extension Warehouse Planned Maintenance and Downtime (We are live!) - #61 by tt_su
and as you see above…Whatever is this means…
This is logged internally.
I guess this is a kind of intentional …
Logged internally doesn’t mean intentional. It means it’s on the to do list.
I’ll always be nervous about this topic … I’d rather leave it …
I’m sorry, but I don’t understand any of this discussion. But it’s very disturbing to me! Admittedly, I have been away from using SketchUp for a few years, but I LOVE it and want to be able to use it! So here are my questions:
A. Does all of this mean that Trimble is turning the Warehouse into another, separate application that one has to pay subscription fees for?
B. I am a free SketchUp user. I do not use it for business, I make no money on it, and I understood that google sold it to Trimble with the understanding that a free version would always be available. I could not afford to pay the subscription rates in any scenario. If a free version wasn’t available, I would be without any recourse. Now, I have created and uploaded my models for free to the Warehouse, so if it was no longer available to me, would Trimble still have my content on it, and allow people to download the items? B-1 - would they start charging people to download the items? B-2 - even if they had received them for free? (You see how clueless I am, but I’m sure I’m not alone!)
C. What is all the talk about “extensions?” My understanding of the word, since computers, is the suffix of a file name. Like .doc or .dwg. What does it mean here? From the context of the posts, I do not know what is being discussed.
D. Are content providers selling their warehouse models? I have no wish to sell anything, or make any money from it, but I also want to be able to download items that I need, for free. What is the story, here?
I have just gone looking for one of my models, a cat tree (I had searched for one, and there weren’t any, so I believe I had the first cat tree on the SketchUp Warehouse, as well as a few others) made in 2014, and I see that now there are dozens of them, maybe more!
Thank you for bearing with me in my total ignorance, and I hope someone will take the time to enlighten me. I would be most grateful!
Gigi Z.
It has been a long time since we’ve seen you. Welcome back.
No. This discussion is regarding a few commercial extensions that are listed in the Extension Warehouse but hosted somewhere else. The authors currently have no option but to select “Free” for the field in the upper right since they aren’t selling them through the Extension Warehouse.
Your content would remain in the 3D Warehouse for others to access. You can continue using SketchUp 2017 Make or you can use Sketchup Free.
I doubt they’d ever start charging people for content from the 3D Warehouse.
I expect that could create problems they aren’t interested in dealing with. Certainly wouldn’t be worth the potential costs to them to do that.
Maybe it’s easiest for you to think of extensions as plugins. This is different from ‘file extensions’ like .dwg, .skp, jpg…
There are content providers out there that are selling their models/components. Sites like Form Fonts is a good source for commercial content. Currently I don’t believe there’s any provision to sell models or components through the 3D Warehouse.
Oh, thank you so much, DaveR! You have cleared things up completely, and I now understand that my world isn’t being shaken up! Whew!
As soon as you said, “plugins,” I understood. What a relief!
Yes, I haven’t been around for a while. Husband died (still can’t believe I’m still breathing, after that), I moved away from NJ and am living in a church that I converted into my home – using SketchUp for the entire process, of course! Have a whole set of new friends, sit on the board of trustees of the local library and museum, and just have a whole new life! It’s busier than when I worked full-time (back when AutoCad was my inadequate tool).
I do have SU Make 2017, and I would like to learn more about lighting and doing better presentations. I suppose I should go to another forum or page on this site, to discuss that, yes?
Gigi Z. (a.k.a. catwoman )
To get really technical, SketchUp extensions are a subset of plugins that adhere to some specifications to avoid clashes and other misbehavior. In everyday SketchUp speech I guess you can use extension and plugin interchangeably.