3D Printing Effort Becomes Linux Foundation Open Standards Project, Announces New Executive Director

SAN FRANCISCO, July 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The 3MF Consortium, the organization dedicated to advancing a universal specification for 3D printing, today announced it is becoming a Linux Foundation member and that HP's Luis Baldez is its new Executive Director (ED). Baldez supersedes Microsoft's Adrian Lannin, who has served as ED since the 3MF Consortium was founded in 2015. Among the original creators of the 3MF Consortium, Lannin will remain a strategic advisor to the group.

The 3MF Consortium is among the original members of the Joint Development Foundation (JDF), which became part of the Linux Foundation in recent years to enable smooth collaboration among open source software projects and open standards. 3MF will take advantage of the combined strengths of the Linux Foundation/JDF alliance to advance 3D printing specifications and formats. With the majority of the world's largest players in the 3D printing industry, 3MF Consortium represents the core of the industry's innovation in this area.

"The 3MF Consortium has done the important work to create an open standard for 3D printing. The time is now to drive the evolution of 3MF from development to adoption," said Luis Baldez, executive director, 3MF Consortium. "We would not be where we are today without Adrian Lannin's leadership and contributions, and we're looking forward to his insights as our ongoing advisor."

Baldez was recently elected Executive Director by the 3MF Consortium membership to expand upon the technical progress and success of the 3MF standard by building new functionalities for the standard through collaboration with Linux Foundation and JDF. Baldez is a 3D printing veteran with experience across new technology business development. It is this combination of expertise that makes him well-suited for the ED role at 3MF Consortium, where the focus is maturing from standards development to implementation and adoption. Baldez has also held R&D engineering leadership positions at other multinationals and startups.

"Luis is a longtime champion of open standards and is an expert in the 3D printing space," said Alex Oster, chairman of the 3MF technical working group and director of additive manufacturing at Autodesk. "Luis' leadership and our collaboration with Linux Foundation will accelerate our work on 3D printing and help us build an even more vibrant network of contributions."

The 3MF Consortium has grown rapidly since its formation in 2015, garnering new member investments and adoption across the industry's leaders in 3D printing. It is supported by 3D Systems, Autodesk, GE, HP, Materialise, Microsoft, nTopology, Stratasys, and Siemens among 16 companies and has been implemented in nearly 40 products across 22 companies. The 3MF specification is robust and includes six extensions that range from core and production to slice, material and property (including color), beam lattice and security. The Secure Content specification was recently released and establishes an underlying mechanism for payload encryption of sensitive 3D printed data based on modern web standards. For the detailed specifications for all extensions, please visit the 3MF Consortium github repository: https://github.com/3MFConsortium/

For more information about the 3MF Consortium, please visit: https://3mf.io/

About the 3MF Consortium
The 3MF Consortium is comprised of leading AM hardware and software companies driving the Industry 4.0 revolution. The consortium releases and maintains the 3MF specifications that allow design applications to send full-fidelity 3D models to a mix of other applications, platforms, services, and printers. For more information, please visit: https://3mf.io/.

About the Joint Development Foundation
Launched in 2015, the Joint Development Foundation (the Joint Development Foundation) is an independent non-profit organization that provides the corporate and legal infrastructure to enable groups to quickly establish and operate standards and source code development collaborations. More information about the Joint Development Foundation is available at http://www.jointdevelopment.org/.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more.  The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit  linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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SOURCE 3MF Consortium