I’m trying to download the Sketchup-STL Extention. Requiring signup and extensive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) violates the license agreement posted on the Git page for the extension. Even though I’ve made an account here, I still can’t seem to download the extension. I’ve copied the license below. You can clearly see that it says “free of charge”. PII is the currency of the Internet, so that is clearly something that you are charging for. Read more about that here.
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2014 Trimble Navigation
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
I applaud your help files, tutorials, and other material. It’s helped me out so far. However, your software is not consistent, you are way too invested in harvesting PII, and your software is incredibly glitchy. I don’t even know how to use it, but I have found it to be seemingly random sometimes. FYI, “From the mouthes of babes…” is equivalent to n00bs giving you advice.
Also, this forum package is horrible. No subforums?
No, I did not have a case of the grumpies this morning.
Hi John. You’re missing the obvious points for some reason. If you try to use the extension warehouse, you have to create an account. You can’t download anything unless you create an account. However, there is a way to import the extension file, so I searched the net and found the Github for it. However, the Github doesn’t have the file, and redirects you to a web version of the extension warehouse, where you also have to log in to download anything.
I have tried creating a Trimble account, and that’s not working. I’ve tried to activate and reactivate it almost 10 times now.
That extension in your pic seems to be called “Clone with HTTPS”, and is not the one I’m looking for. I don’t see any corresponding download button for the Sketchup-STL extension.
I downloaded the source from Git, then used the steps in your gif to make a zip file. I then renamed the *.zip file to *.RBZ, and Sketchup was able to make use of it through the manual installation method. It complains about it being unsigned, but I’m fine with that.
This forum platform is called “Discourse”. It can be installed and managed by a company, or as a paid hosted service by discourse.org. (SketchUp choose to have discourse host it.)
Discourse uses a database of posts, each of which has a “category” property that is used to filter the lists of posts into categorical lists. This means that posts are not divided into sub-forums, or (when posted in the wrong place) moved from forum to forum, … instead their “category” filter property is simply changed (by a sage, admin, or the OP,) allowing them to appear in the proper category display list.
You can access the Categories list from the top menu bar, or at any time from the hamburger menu (icon at top right between search and avatar icons.)
The license for any particular extension (in this case the MIT License,) applies only to that extension. Other extensions by the SketchUp team have in the past used other licenses, and may still do so. Other extensions by other extension developers can and do use other licenses, or a custom license by the author.
So your assumption that the Extension Warehouse …
… is invalid, further because …
The SketchUp Extension Warehouse and 3D Warehouse, per the SketchUp application EULA, section 2.8., each have it’s own Terms of Service (license), viz:
Trimble’s 3D Warehouse and Extension Warehouse and the content on them, including without limitation, 3D Models and Extensions, are made available and licensed for access and use pursuant to separate agreements.
As a new user, how am I supposed to differentiate the myriad of companies and products that you just rattled off, let alone their accompanying legalese? From my perspective (prior to your admonishment), Sketchup, the forum, and the particular extension I was looking for were all from the same company.
And as far as “(do some due diligence)”, I guess you forgot to read my post where I described what I found by using DuckDuckGo and how it was unsuccessful in getting me along my way, and where I was stuck.
Nice to know that differentthink is beaten with a rubber hose around here. I notice one of my posts got flagged for removal, yet two other equally “crabby” posts are still here, including yours.
My comments had nothing to do with racism, either directly or implied.
British would have been my next guess. I was picking up on some kind of native language difference. It’s like if you have transmit and receive on different pins when transmit needs to be connected to receive: no talky-talky.
Not mine, I do not work for Trimble. I do not maintain that I myself love all the clauses in the various SketchUp EULAs.
You are free to have any poor opinion you care to about EULAs in general, or lawyers, or legalese, or fine print, or bureaucrats, … and you’ll find many here (including myself) will agree with you. The Corner Bar category would be the place to start an interesting thread on this, as it a bit off-topic for this thread.
This is exactly my point !
A new user should not make assumptions (having read general blogs that are not SketchUp specific,) and then post “statements of fact” that are actually erroneous.
Instead, just ask a simple question like “How can I download the STL an extension from the warehouse without an account ?” or “Why do we need an account for the Warehouse ?” (The latter actually belongs in the Extension Warehouse category. The STL question has been asked and answered before because sometimes the EW goes down for maintenance or some issue, or the user has an account but cannot log in for some unknown reason, ie a bug on the server-side.)
Eventually, if the user continues using SketchUp, they’ll gain the understanding of what agreements cover what services and products. They are not bestowed upon a person magically just by installing the trial product. (And yes, the links to them are scattered and somewhat hard to find.)
No one should base their own legal opinion(s) by reading derogatory opinions from non-lawyer “tech bloggers”, or the like. (Even agreeing to the fact that EULA writers do make mistakes like anyone else.) None of what those links said will negate nor invalidate any of the end user’s responsibilities or limitations of the Trimble EULAs, (or those of any other software products,) should the user decide to agree to them and continue using the software.
End users are always free to decline the terms, and cease using the product(s). But how can a person agree or disagree with any terms if they do not read them?
The application EULA is presented for reading, to the person installing the software during SketchUp install, and is available anytime to the user via a link on SketchUp’s “About” dialog. So, I am sorry, but using the excuse “no one reads EULAs” is not a valid excuse for incompetence. On the other hand, not understanding some legal language in them is perfectly understandable. A forum search done on “EULA” and threads will be found where users ask such questions. Likely also threads where users complain about clauses in them.
Did I read the SketchUp EULAs ? YES. Several times in fact. And again whenever a change is announced. (But then I’m a registered developer, so it is part of being a professional software geek to have to read EULAs and Terms of Service agreements. Otherwise I could operate in a manner outside the terms, which would put me in violation, causing my rights granted under the terms to cease.) The SketchUp agreements, in my opinion, do not read so bad as others, especially Microsoft agreements.
Did I read the terms the very first time I installed SketchUp version 7.0 , more than 8 years ago ? NO. Because I was just test driving it, and didn’t know whether it would live past an hour on my computer.
But the time comes when a user needs to get serious about the tools they use for creating intellectual property. At that point, I would think that a user had to be better served by informing themselves about the limitations or rights they enjoy under the terms of the tool’s EULA. For me it must have been around version 7.1 that I first read the EULA, just over 8 years ago.
I tried to write it in an informative and educational tone. That is the goal in the end, for it to be helpful to any new user who may land here by searching the forum for the same downloading issue. ( I haven’t spanked you all that hard, now )
I’ll edit the above and collapse the “moral of the story”.
Used to be the case prior to 2012 when Google owned SketchUp, the forums were hosted on Google Groups, but the Extension Warehouse was not implemented until Trimble bought SketchUp and rolled it out for the SketchUp 2013 release. As part of the sale, everything had to be moved off of Google sites and servers by year 5 (which was April 2017.) The forums moved to Discourse, and community code projects that were on Google Code Sites moved to GitHub, etc.
It doesn’t matter whether it be racism, dialect-elitism, grammerism, pronunciationism, etc. It was an “ad hominem” response against a forum sage that was trying to help you. These are prohibited by the forum guidelines.
The post will not be removed unless you delete it, but it will be hidden (collapsed) until any reader clicks the “show hidden content” link. (Not to mention that John quoted it, so it is not really hidden.)
I myself edited my above response, in the “moral” section because I felt it looked too personal and first used the pronoun “you”. So I immediately edited it to “soften” it and apply towards any reader of this thread.
I always read 100% of every post in each thread, before I respond in any thread. I saw that John was successful in getting you to download and manually install the RBZ.
However, you also made other statements, and complaints, so I responded to two: license comments and the forum complaint, which were incorrect.
“Crabby posts” are not specifically prohibited by the forum rules. (I used that above as a softer adjective than “bit hy” which the system will block out.)
Again, I was attempting to be educational and matter of fact in tone.
Again, (twice above) you are responding by attacking people (who are trying to educate you about how things work here, and how to get the best answers more quickly.) This is prohibited by the forum guidelines ! You have not yet earned a “Read Guidelines” badge, so please read them they are only one small page, with no “legalese” language.
FYI, You can also use a Google account (if you have one.) But you should be able to use the same account that you used to log in to these forums. IF NOT, then look in the Extension Warehouse category to see if others are reporting errors installing or updating extensions from the EW, or if any Trimble team members have posted any “pinned” threads on warehouse errors or maintenance.
)
hy” which the system will block out.)