Adrian Bowyer's response to RepRapPro-UK closing down
Posted by reprapprochina
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Adrian Bowyer's response to RepRapPro-UK closing down January 16, 2016 08:04AM |
Registered: 9 years ago Posts: 36 |
Adrian Bowyer [ PM ]
Re: RepRapPro closing down
January 16, 2016 04:42AM Admin
I hope, in this post, to inform you about a number of things to do with RepRapPro Ltd:
1. What happened to RepRapPro Ltd?
We were making a profit, but that had been falling. We decided to close while we still had some funds and no liabilities.
The closure may be permanent, or it may not. There are other people interested in buying the company, and one of those deals may go ahead. If no such deal can be achieved the company will close for good.
If the company is sold it will remain open-source. The company Memorandum of Association contains the following clauses:
---
60. Special shares and Intelectual Property
The Ordinary B shares issued under certificates numbered 15 (initial owner Jean-Marc Giacalone), 16 (initial owner Sally Bowyer), 17 (initial owner Adrian Bowyer), 18 (initial owner Emma Giacalone), and 19 (initial owner Christine Bowyer) shall have special powers over Section 60 of this document
The powers of the Ordinary B special shares shall be transferred with the shares to their initial owners’ heirs and assigns.
The Ordinary B special shares are only special with regard to Section 60 of this document. In all other respects they behave as all other Ordinary shares in the company.
No part of Section 60 of this document may be altered, amended, deleted, or added to without the unanimous approval of all owners of the Ordinary B special shares.
The company shall be an open-source company.
If the company acquires or takes out any patents, those patents shall be freely and publicly released for use by anyone without the payment of royalties.
All software, CAD designs, documentation, or any other intellectual property created by, or owned by, the company shall be freely released under the GNU Public Licence, or a similar software libre licence, at or before the date when the company sells or releases any product incorporating that software, CAD designs, documentation, or any other intellectual property.
Section 60 of this document shall not apply to copyright material intended purely for the company’s sales and advertising, nor to its trademarks.
---
I shall retain my B share if the company is sold, as will the other initial shareholders. I will not agree to any change in that clause.
2. What will happen to the RepRap Project?
Nothing bad. The Project and the Company are entirely separate. The only link between them is that I started the RepRap Project and was one of the founders of RepRapPro Ltd. The company was based on the RepRap Project, just as almost all small 3D printing companies are (whether they acknowledge it or not). The RepRap Project will continue undiminished, and all its servers, forums, wiki and so on will be unaltered as they are entirely separate from the company and are wholly administered by people who have nothing to do with the company.
3. What will happen to RepRapPro China?
Nothing bad. RepRapPro Ltd and RepRapPro China Ltd are entirely separate. We helped to set-up RepRapPro China, and have worked closely with them ever since. But they are an entirely autonomous company. However, they were contractually obliged to sell only in China. The closure of RepRapPro Ltd in the UK would remove that contractual obligation, and so they could then sell worldwide.
4. Why did RepRapPro Ltd close?
Competition. If you search for 3D printers on Google Shopping you will see the very large number of companies that have grown up in the last couple of years. When we started there were only about six. Of late, we have been breaking even, but our financial projections in late 2015 clearly showed that this would not continue. And we could see no way of expanding without borrowing $CrazyAmount from people who would have wanted to exert control over us and would have tut-tutted at our open-source Company Memorandum of Association. This we were not prepared to do.
It has not escaped my attention that this great flowering of small companies (all essentially based on the RepRap Project) making commercial life difficult for each other was pretty-much what I predicted when I started the Project (see various old videos of me giving talks online). We (the RepRapPro Directors) knew that this was eventually going to happen when we started. But we expected it to take decades, not four years.
5. How did RepRapPro Ltd close?
Before Christmas we were not quite sure if the company would close completely, or if we might be able to sell it. That is still the case, but we could not expect our employees to remain with no income between then and some uncertain future sale date.
Our first priorities were to do the right thing by those employees and by our customers under the financial constraints that we had. This meant informing the employees of their impending redundancy on the day that we made the decision that we were going to close or to sell the company. This allowed us to make sure that we had enough cash to give them their full redundancy payments as required by the law.
Then Dr Rongsheng Zhang of RepRapPro China stepped in and worked tirelessly over Christmas to try to find us a buyer, or to finance a buyout by RepRapPro China. His work on this is ongoing.
Our online shop had been suspended for the Christmas break. After Christmas we finally knew that the Company would not be selling online for the forseeable future, so we put the notice up on our website the same day that we found out. We closed the shop. We knew that we could supply all outstanding orders and pay all outstanding bills at that point.
Throughout the whole process our aim has been to achieve a soft landing, with nobody out of pocket and with the Company remaining solvent, all the while telling everyone as much as we could as early as we could about what was going on. This was surprisingly tricky to do...
6. What will happen to your stock and the data you have generated?
Every last bit of data on our Github repository will be retained in perpetuity for free access by everyone.
As many of you will know, Ian has laboured long and most effectively over the documentation for all our products. This will all be converted to PDF format and added to the Github repository.
All the CAD designs and their derivative files (STLs, Gerbers etc) are already in the repository and will be kept there.
We don't have much stock left. But that that we do have we have split equally between the two parent companies, eMaker Ltd and RepRap Ltd. Those companies will be selling that stock to people for spares.
We have put a list of useful resources on the front page of reprappro.com.
7. Anything else?
We will do our best to answer queries, e-mails and so on after our official closing date of 15 January 2015. But this closure itself has generated an enormous amount of ongoing work, and there are only the three company directors to do that.
I hope that I have answered the most common questions above, but if you have any other points to raise we will do our best to answer them given the constraints described in the previous paragraph.
Life is great, except for the end bit. And running RepRapPro Ltd has been a really enjoyable experience for all of us, except in the last few months... That enjoyment was because we have had such supporting, loyal and knowledgeable customers. I would like to end by thanking everyone other than me who put RepRap information freely online (which gave us a great technical base), those customers, our dedicated ex-employees, and our faithful suppliers. Without you all we would have been nothing.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2016 04:52AM by Adrian Bowyer.
best wishes
Adrian
[reprap.org]
[reprappro.com]
RepRapPro China 技术支持团队
西安锐普3D打印机有限公司
www.reprappro.com.cn
Re: RepRapPro closing down
January 16, 2016 04:42AM Admin
I hope, in this post, to inform you about a number of things to do with RepRapPro Ltd:
1. What happened to RepRapPro Ltd?
We were making a profit, but that had been falling. We decided to close while we still had some funds and no liabilities.
The closure may be permanent, or it may not. There are other people interested in buying the company, and one of those deals may go ahead. If no such deal can be achieved the company will close for good.
If the company is sold it will remain open-source. The company Memorandum of Association contains the following clauses:
---
60. Special shares and Intelectual Property
The Ordinary B shares issued under certificates numbered 15 (initial owner Jean-Marc Giacalone), 16 (initial owner Sally Bowyer), 17 (initial owner Adrian Bowyer), 18 (initial owner Emma Giacalone), and 19 (initial owner Christine Bowyer) shall have special powers over Section 60 of this document
The powers of the Ordinary B special shares shall be transferred with the shares to their initial owners’ heirs and assigns.
The Ordinary B special shares are only special with regard to Section 60 of this document. In all other respects they behave as all other Ordinary shares in the company.
No part of Section 60 of this document may be altered, amended, deleted, or added to without the unanimous approval of all owners of the Ordinary B special shares.
The company shall be an open-source company.
If the company acquires or takes out any patents, those patents shall be freely and publicly released for use by anyone without the payment of royalties.
All software, CAD designs, documentation, or any other intellectual property created by, or owned by, the company shall be freely released under the GNU Public Licence, or a similar software libre licence, at or before the date when the company sells or releases any product incorporating that software, CAD designs, documentation, or any other intellectual property.
Section 60 of this document shall not apply to copyright material intended purely for the company’s sales and advertising, nor to its trademarks.
---
I shall retain my B share if the company is sold, as will the other initial shareholders. I will not agree to any change in that clause.
2. What will happen to the RepRap Project?
Nothing bad. The Project and the Company are entirely separate. The only link between them is that I started the RepRap Project and was one of the founders of RepRapPro Ltd. The company was based on the RepRap Project, just as almost all small 3D printing companies are (whether they acknowledge it or not). The RepRap Project will continue undiminished, and all its servers, forums, wiki and so on will be unaltered as they are entirely separate from the company and are wholly administered by people who have nothing to do with the company.
3. What will happen to RepRapPro China?
Nothing bad. RepRapPro Ltd and RepRapPro China Ltd are entirely separate. We helped to set-up RepRapPro China, and have worked closely with them ever since. But they are an entirely autonomous company. However, they were contractually obliged to sell only in China. The closure of RepRapPro Ltd in the UK would remove that contractual obligation, and so they could then sell worldwide.
4. Why did RepRapPro Ltd close?
Competition. If you search for 3D printers on Google Shopping you will see the very large number of companies that have grown up in the last couple of years. When we started there were only about six. Of late, we have been breaking even, but our financial projections in late 2015 clearly showed that this would not continue. And we could see no way of expanding without borrowing $CrazyAmount from people who would have wanted to exert control over us and would have tut-tutted at our open-source Company Memorandum of Association. This we were not prepared to do.
It has not escaped my attention that this great flowering of small companies (all essentially based on the RepRap Project) making commercial life difficult for each other was pretty-much what I predicted when I started the Project (see various old videos of me giving talks online). We (the RepRapPro Directors) knew that this was eventually going to happen when we started. But we expected it to take decades, not four years.
5. How did RepRapPro Ltd close?
Before Christmas we were not quite sure if the company would close completely, or if we might be able to sell it. That is still the case, but we could not expect our employees to remain with no income between then and some uncertain future sale date.
Our first priorities were to do the right thing by those employees and by our customers under the financial constraints that we had. This meant informing the employees of their impending redundancy on the day that we made the decision that we were going to close or to sell the company. This allowed us to make sure that we had enough cash to give them their full redundancy payments as required by the law.
Then Dr Rongsheng Zhang of RepRapPro China stepped in and worked tirelessly over Christmas to try to find us a buyer, or to finance a buyout by RepRapPro China. His work on this is ongoing.
Our online shop had been suspended for the Christmas break. After Christmas we finally knew that the Company would not be selling online for the forseeable future, so we put the notice up on our website the same day that we found out. We closed the shop. We knew that we could supply all outstanding orders and pay all outstanding bills at that point.
Throughout the whole process our aim has been to achieve a soft landing, with nobody out of pocket and with the Company remaining solvent, all the while telling everyone as much as we could as early as we could about what was going on. This was surprisingly tricky to do...
6. What will happen to your stock and the data you have generated?
Every last bit of data on our Github repository will be retained in perpetuity for free access by everyone.
As many of you will know, Ian has laboured long and most effectively over the documentation for all our products. This will all be converted to PDF format and added to the Github repository.
All the CAD designs and their derivative files (STLs, Gerbers etc) are already in the repository and will be kept there.
We don't have much stock left. But that that we do have we have split equally between the two parent companies, eMaker Ltd and RepRap Ltd. Those companies will be selling that stock to people for spares.
We have put a list of useful resources on the front page of reprappro.com.
7. Anything else?
We will do our best to answer queries, e-mails and so on after our official closing date of 15 January 2015. But this closure itself has generated an enormous amount of ongoing work, and there are only the three company directors to do that.
I hope that I have answered the most common questions above, but if you have any other points to raise we will do our best to answer them given the constraints described in the previous paragraph.
Life is great, except for the end bit. And running RepRapPro Ltd has been a really enjoyable experience for all of us, except in the last few months... That enjoyment was because we have had such supporting, loyal and knowledgeable customers. I would like to end by thanking everyone other than me who put RepRap information freely online (which gave us a great technical base), those customers, our dedicated ex-employees, and our faithful suppliers. Without you all we would have been nothing.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/16/2016 04:52AM by Adrian Bowyer.
best wishes
Adrian
[reprap.org]
[reprappro.com]
RepRapPro China 技术支持团队
西安锐普3D打印机有限公司
www.reprappro.com.cn
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Re: Adrian Bowyer's response to RepRapPro-UK closing down August 07, 2018 06:52AM |
Registered: 6 years ago Posts: 174 |
Reading this realy brings a tear to my eyes.
I am the owner of an Ormerod 1 and have had many enjoyable and also frustrating moments with it.
But the enjoyment of being able to create your own machine and being able to modify it to better suit your need is definately something that the world should not loose.
Thank you Sir Adrian Bowyer for sharing this amazing invention with the whole world. You are a saint and desevre to be Knighted for your vital work in this field.
Best regards
MB James
I am the owner of an Ormerod 1 and have had many enjoyable and also frustrating moments with it.
But the enjoyment of being able to create your own machine and being able to modify it to better suit your need is definately something that the world should not loose.
Thank you Sir Adrian Bowyer for sharing this amazing invention with the whole world. You are a saint and desevre to be Knighted for your vital work in this field.
Best regards
MB James
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