Chitubox - Unencrypt your new ctb format

Chitubox - Unencrypt your new ctb format

Started
August 2, 2021
Petition to
ChiTu Systems
Signatures: 1,175Next Goal: 1,500
Support now

Why this petition matters

Started by Chris S

TLDR; To promote growth, unencrypt the new generation of Chitu boards.  We don't want an SDK.

The 3d printer resin community is growing rapidly.  The printers that have come out in the last few years are rapidly advancing and the quality of the prints is absolutely stunning.  ChiTu Systems with their boards and software have been a big part of that.  However, in the last year, viable alternatives to their software have become more prominent.  Competition has risen and many prominent social media influencers are publicly promoting their competition.
However, they still make the main driving board in the printer. 
As such, ChiTu has decided to lock their new ctb format on the printer's hardware to only work with their software.  They are offering a SDK (software development kit) to interact with the format that will be free to some and for others they will "provide the corresponding commercial authorization on the premise of reaching cooperation".  
This isn't what the community wants.  The level of outrage is clear. Locking the boards stifles growth on the software side, which is where we really need growth to attract more users! Supports and autosupports are a major pain for most users and this is a feature where we need to see competitive growth. Locking boards hurts that growth. Users are canceling orders with printers that have locked boards. This will hurt the industry.

Simply offering an SDK is not what we want.  
As somebody who works in the software industry, an SDK is a poor option:

  1. It limits who gets to play. If a little startup company has a big idea, now they have to contract with you, rather than just be innovative and bring a product to market.
  2. It limits what functions get supported.  Its very easy to limit the competition via an SDK.  Things like print speed or advanced functions can be limited or made unavailable to limit competition.
  3. Its difficult to innovate inside an SDK.  If you want to do something the SDK supports, great.  What if you have a bonkers idea for a new way to do it...nope, the SDK may not support it and now you're limited by ChiTu's methods in the SDK.
  4. It will force existing software into potentially major rewrites.  Other software, free or commercial, may need to rewrite large portions of their code to accommodate an SDK.  An SDK does not simply open the format. Its a set of interaction tools.  Existing software will have to be rewritten to use those tools.  This has the potential to force major rewrites.

Overall, we don't want an SDK.  We want the board unencrypted.  Let Chitubox compete as a product on its own.  Put out a quality product instead of trying to force people to use Chitubox.

Free the boards.  Promote growth in the industry.
Unencrypt the latest boards.

Support now
Signatures: 1,175Next Goal: 1,500
Support now
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Decision Makers

  • ChiTu Systems