Our team has been working hard making Speckle connectors for a variety of AEC applications such as Revit, Rhino, Dynamo, Grasshopper, AutoCAD, Civil 3D, Blender, Unity 3D, Unreal Engine and more are under way.
We have also developed a set of tools and SDKs to help you write your own connectors, so that together we can push our industry forward towards a better and more transparent way of dealing with data - and not to mention it, to improve the status of interoperability as well!
hey @teocomi - what are the restrictions on using the Speckle trademark in the name of a connector? Trademark Usage Policy is silent on this point, and at any rate is says it is subject to change. I’m thinking particuarly about SpeckleGSA, which we will continue to develop under our own github org. We have been using that name since before Speckle was trademarked, but going forward, I thought it would be good to be clear. This would also apply to the microstation and etabs clients we have (double trademark issues on those ones, but that is a separate discussion…)
Our intent with the ™ is mostly to protect from a random company offering Speckle branded services that copy ours - think, for example, Speckle Enterprise - and it’s meant to add a modicum of defensibility around Speckle’s brand.
A situation that we want to avoid, and where the trademark will actually help us: say Evil. Corp. creates “Speckle Revit”, “the best Speckle Connector!” and that connector forces users to their private server that we can’t audit or provide guarantees for, or secretly does other mischief, thus tarnishing the reputation of both our company and the project - then we can swoop in and force Evil Corp. to - at least - stop using the name Speckle.
Connectors are less vulnerable and, IMHO, I don’t expect adversarial situations to arise there (there’s precious few of us that develop them!). “GSA Connector For Speckle” / “GSA-Speckle Connector” would be a good “official” name for the connector, until it graduates and makes its way in the main installer, etc. (if that’s the plan for it!). Our policy right now, mostly due to manpower - is to ultimately make sure that the bugs others add to the ecosystem are attributed to the authors, rather than to Speckle - hence the added caution. Let us know re other questions!
A small, optional, moment of self reflection...
Some might say we add enough bugs by ourselves that this is a lost cause already 😅
Thanks for bringing this up! In general, if it’s a connector that we’re not working on you’ll be allowed to use the “Speckle” mark without limitations. It’s best to check with us beforehand anyways to get written approval. I’ll make sure to update our policy to reflect this!
Thanks, @teocomi and @dimitrie, sounds good. As we work out the details of naming, I’ll definintely reach out to agree something in writing.
Regarding including other clients in the Speckle Manager: is the Connector panel only going to show connectors from the speckle-sharp repo, or do you envision including connectors that are managed elsewhere? We plan to continue development of the GSA connector at arup-group/SpeckleGSA.
Great! We’d be more than happy to have SpeckleGSA and other community contributions in Manager.
Please ping me again when it’s ready to be published and I’ll write up some docs (it just consists in creating an installer and a small manifest file and uploading them in a bucket)!
writing your own connector guide
