Ortur Laser will go open source

Well, that was fast! Last week we talked about a video by [Norbert Heinz] in which he called out Ortur laser engravers for apparently using GPL-licensed grbl firmware without providing the source code and their modifications as required by the license . Because open source and grbl are dear to our hearts and CNC machines, we wrote about Norbert's efforts again over the weekend, speculating that it might just be a misunderstanding of the open source license requirements from Ortur.

Due to [Norbert]'s persistence and publicity around the issue, the support ticket eventually reached the right person within Ortur, and within two or three days [Gil Araújo], administrator of support at Ortur, managed to convince the company that going fully open source was the right thing to do. It remains to be seen how to do it, operationally.

So [Gil] asked [Norbert] to ask Hackaday: what do you expect from Ortur about this, and how should they proceed? Over email, he notably asked for best practices for setting up the repository and making the code actually useful to non-programmer types. He said he had looked at other laser engraving companies and couldn't find any good examples of others doing the right thing™, so he asked [Norbert] to ask us. And now we ask you!

Do you have any good examples of companies using open source firmware, modifying it, and making it available to their users? Is a simple Github repository with a README enough, or should we spend time making it friendly for non-coders? Or start with the first and work towards the second as a goal? I'm sure [Gil] will read the comments, so be constructive! You'll help a laser engraving company take its first steps towards truly engaging with the open source community.

We've said it before, and we'll say it again. Good job [Norbert] on taking Ortur to task here, but also doing it in a way that gives them room to turn around and do the right thing. It also underscores that companies are not monolithic beasts - sometimes it takes getting your case heard by the right person within a company to change the response from "it's a business secret" to "how should we configure our Github?" And kudos to [Gil] and Ortur for listening to their users!