Libre de faire, Faire Libre

MakerBot CEO Bre Prettis is a pretty cool customer, so I took it as a good sign when he yelped with excitement at SketchUp's 3D Basecamp 2012 after the announcement of SketchUp’s STL plugin.

Reading and writing STL files from SketchUp is something that users have been able to do for a while with the help of two separate ruby plugins. But as 3D printing has continued to boom, we’ve been thinking of ways to make this file exchange easier. So we emailed the original plugin developers, Jim Foltz, Nathan Bromham, and Konrad Shroeder, and asked if they would be interested in letting us combine their tools into a single open source plugin. All three responded with a resounding “yes!”