The state of open-source in 3D printing in 2023
blog.prusa3d.com
blog.prusa3d.com
Those are not things you can clone – not cheaply, anyway. That's the deal with any premium brand that has earned its reputation. There will always be imitators, and there will always be people who scoff and call you a rip-off because the cost of your product is greater than the sum of its parts. You ignore that, because you're better than that.
To me, being aggressively open source is a line in the sand on this point. It's saying "Go ahead: clone us. We don't care. Clones are not a threat, because the design is not what you're paying extra for."
Conversely, backpedaling on that position seems like a mistake. It's switching to a different strategy where you're instead saying "Actually, our IP is the only thing that differentiates us, and otherwise, we're the same as any other manufacturer." That's a dangerous game to play, and you only want to play it if you can ensure that you're going to be ahead of the curve on innovation.
And, well, much as I love Prusa… they're not ahead of that curve right now. Their value is that they have great QA and great support, and it seems to me that their stance should reflect that.
I don't claim to know anything about Prusa's financials or technology, but if they are not technologically ahead of the curve as you say – could it be because they're starved for resources to do R&D, because they're losing too many customers to rip-offs?
I think a bit more context might be helpful.
When the MK4 was launched I went online to see what people were saying about it. I came across a few youtube videos and blog postings that lambast Prusa, pointing out that they are not cutting edge, accusing Josef Prusa of wanting to dominate the low cost market and then not being able to agree with themselves if Prusa copies too much or too little of what other people have come up with.
I think the blog posting has to be seen as a response to this criticism. Not that their business model isn't working. Because so far, it has worked great. I ordered a new MK4 as soon as it became available, knowing full well that there are cheaper printers and more ambitious printers out there. But I want a Prusa because I know it will _work_. And if it doesn't work, Prusa will stand by their product and help you make it work.
To me that's actually worth paying more for. If at the same time I can support open source, the choice isn't really hard. I'm not a 3D printing enthusiast. I don't care if the filament sensor isn't the most clever solution there is. I only care that it actually works. I need a 3D printer that I can fire up and which will print what I've designed with a minimum of hassle. I don't want to dick around with my 3D printer. I want a reasonably priced product that works, and if it doesn't, a company behind it that will fix things.
When watching the critics two things struck me. The first was that they are 3D printing enthusiasts. They care about the technology and who came up with what idea more than they care about understanding the product. The second was that they do not understand product engineering. Engineering a product isn't about what ticks boxes on paper - it is about produces a good product. Novelty is cool, but novelty that doesn't improve the product is pointless waste.
If you look at a Prusa i3 Mk3 it looks flimsy and mechanically dodgy. Especially when I compare it to my Makergear M2, which is built like a tank. My first reaction when I used a Prusa i3 Mk3 was "this printer works unreasonably well". I hadn't expect it to outperform my M2, which consists of a much better frame, quality linear rails and the stiffest extruder gantry I have seen on any printer.
But the thing is, my Makergear M2 is a bad purchase. The company behind dropped the ball on all the important details. From the build plate, which is an afterthought that doesn't even come with a working mechanism for affixing it to the XY-carriage, the lack of effort that went into the firmware, the poor stepper controllers, to the Z-axis adjustment which is a laughably bad design.
Worse yet, after spending 2-3 times as much money buying an M2, the company kind of abandoned it. Without ever refining it to where it is a proper product. Am I ever going to buy another Makergear product? Of course not. The value for money is atrocious. You have to be a 3d printing enthusiast to fix the product so it works half way decent. They have come up with a few upgrades, but they haven't addressed many of the things you have to deal with every day.
After the first time I tried a Prusa i3 Mk3 we bought several of them at my previous job. The Makerspace I'm a member of has a whole fleet of them. And at every single prototyping company I've been at, there is usually a printer farm consisting of lots of Prusa printers. Not because they can't afford "better" but because it is what the engineers prefer to use. Because they work.
When companies that make tons of money and can afford to buy any 3D printer they want still choose to buy a bunch of Prusa printers, it is worth asking why this is.
You don't always need to be ahead of the curve to serve your customers. You just need to make a better product and provide better support. Or even a product that works properly. Prusa does that. A lot of their competitors, including the clone-makers and more ambitious products very often don't.
However, Prusa has been selling essentially 2017 technology for too long. Many customers are OK with this because 3D printing got to a decent point in 2017 and they don't need new frills. However, I think the inherent speed limit of the bed slinger design is going to start causing problems for them. Eventually people who just want a workhorse printer will also realize it's nice when the printer takes 60% of the time to produce the same output. Prusa hasn't demonstrated an ability to keep up with where the industry is going.
Josef Prusa is a fantastic salesman, and he has built his company into a large, formidable, and profitable one, thanks mostly to his core team of competent businesspeople to whom he gives no credit. But you see his name everywhere. In fact the company logo has his name twice. I mean, WTAF? Whose ego is so fragile that he has to put his name in the company logo twice?
The Prusa corporation scams its employees and the taxpayers of the Czech Republic by having everyone on a "double contract" where employees are given a minimum wage full employment and taxed on that, with their extra hours being paid on top. It is totally sleazy and unethical.
Employees have coin-operated coffee machines, The owner drives a disgustingly expensive Audi.
Prusa has been surfing on their brand recognition and slavish brand loyalty for years, and now the chickens have come home to roost. The Bambulab printers are at least 4 years ahead of the competition, everyone knows it, and no one with any sense will buy Prusa printers for more money and far fewer features.
Prusa printers have simply not innovated at all, and their respect for their customers is absolutely zero.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the ego-driven, absolute profit-maximizing Prusa company. Their luck is running out now, and finally we are seeing innovation again. The innovation is coming from everywhere but Prusa.
I bought an Ender 3 quite cheaply (less than €150). I've spent countless hours, fiddling, upgrading, repairing obvious small flaws until it printed really well.
Granted, I leaned a LOT about all things relating 3D printing during this journey. But, there was a lot of frustration, time spent, and even a good amount of money.
I don't regret it the slightest, I learned important skills.
But, we bought a Prusa MK3.5 at my work, and, it just worked, since day one (came pre assembled). No fiddling, no slicer tunning, nothing. We just asked it to print, and done.
So, don't think a 5x cheaper print is equivalent to a Prusa, it's just not.
But the old Ender 3 is infamous for being hit and miss in setup, the point is that they now have the V2 and other lines which apparently just work out of the box because they're almost fully assembled, much like the old Prusas. Their head start in that area is gone.
I do not love nor support this approach, but there is a certain market reality behind the rationale.
It is also hard to believe that the semiconductor market would be affected significantly by the - in comparison tiny - 3D printing companies.
Someone coming into a small market and scooping up 10k parts can absolutely move the needle on the pricing, and it already happened to Prusa (if self-inflicted). This isn't a theoretical.
Also, they have been using 32bit controllers for all new FDM printers since the release of the Prusa Mini in 2019. That now includes the XL and the Mk4.
[0]: https://www.printables.com/model/378252-i-3030-fdm-3d-printe...
[1]: https://files.printables.com/media/prints/378252/other_files...
Also it recently started allowing models that aren't CC or open source, at the same time as adding blue checkmark brand accounts.
A lot of open source code is hosted on github, which isn't open source either.
It isn't really an issue, I was just correcting bmsleight_. It would be nice to have an open source model repository though.
They also seem to be announcing that they are going to lie about it by falsely claiming that it is open source.
Hopefully this is an April Fool's joke.
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¹ They say it would permit the production of such parts "after the verification by the licensor", which is to say that it would permit the production of such parts at the licensor's pleasure. This is similar to the situation with copyright, where you can make copies of the work if the copyright owner approves of it, but it is not at all clear that heater blocks and printing plates are subject to copyright.
I'm pretty sure it isn't but it is devilishly clever to drop news like this on a date like this.
But as to their decision: It's tough -- obviously we all want to support Reprap movement, Prusa, Ultimaker, etc. and the original innovators in this space of desktop 3d printers, but this is the way things happen, when you've optimized your technique and product the Chinese tend to come and kill you with their high volume low margin approach. Can you really blame them for doing what they're doing? It was probably an existential decision for them.
i don't really blame them for giving up on open-source hardware, even if i wish they wouldn't, but i certainly do blame them for lying about it
That seems way more achievable legally than a "you can copy it you can't rip it off" license.
This was posted on the Prusa blog on March 29th.
I'm sympathetic to wanting a more "copyleft" or "AGPL like" open hardware licence, even the CERN-OHL-S could be improved, but none of those points advocate that.
You can benefit from our innovation but only if it's in addition to your own innovation.
I kind of like that because unlike patents which stifle innovation, it encourages acceleration of innovation.
The main alternative regime seems to be industrial secrets, are they less stifling?
Then of course there is the option of embracing open source across industry by recognizing as a culture that widespread innovation grows the economy faster than restricted innovation.
Either way, bringing back advertising clauses is a bad idea.
What it should be encouraging is the formation of new companies whose only product is the clone; they don't have the product development overhead when they're setting out their stall. Those companies can then use the cloned design as a cashflow springboard for their own designs as a second phase. There is nothing wrong with that as a business model.
However, that's not what we see. What we see is clones being denigrated as valueless rip-offs, so people who might otherwise get into business by that route are dissuaded from doing so.
That attitude is absolutely reinforced by blog posts like this. Play stupid games, get stupid prizes.
Specifically:
- What is the long term durability like? --- Do the nozzles leak when using high performance materials? (E3D themselves cannot even ship anything other than Revo that can actually make this claim with the only exception being Prusa factory installed 0.4n V6s) --- Extruder durability?
- What is the support experience like? We've heard it is patchy relative to Prusa, specifically around spare parts availability.
- How is the lifting / warping problem with the given build surfaces and enclosure? This is a non-trivial problem if you want to use the entire surface for large jobs with advanced materials.
Would be curious to know if you have any insights on these points or using Bambu in a professional context and how they perform.
The Bambu hotend is a fully integrated unit, with the (hardened steel) nozzle, hotend and throat being shrink-fitted together. It is at least as leak-resistant as the Revo. The extruder is broadly derivative of the Bondtech BMG/LGX, with hardened steel hob gears; I would expect it to have similar durability.
>What is the support experience like? We've heard it is patchy relative to Prusa, specifically around spare parts availability.
Bambu have had issues with availability of machines and spares, which is to be expected for a company growing at their speed. As I speak, most parts are available, with a few backordered with ETAs of early April.
>How is the lifting / warping problem with the given build surfaces and enclosure? This is a non-trivial problem if you want to use the entire surface for large jobs with advanced materials.
Auto bed leveling is fast and accurate, with optional confirmation of first layer quality using the LIDAR scanner. Build plate adhesion is what you'd expect from textured PEI. I have seen some complaints of warped beds. It's fully enclosed, which is essential for printing with materials like ABS. The controller's camera provides automatic failed print detection.
Neither Bambu or Prusa make truly industrial machines; if you need high uptime and business-level support, you'd want to buy something from the likes of Makerbot, Zortrax or Raise3D. Of course, you would pay several times more for the privilege. With that said, I see no reason to trust a Bambu machine any less than a Prusa.
In many jurisdictions violating copyright is a felony, it is prosecuted viciously with fines up to 100k$ per infringement and jail time and in the civil courts with extraordinary damages.
How can Prusa go forward with that? I don't know. I know though from a handful of interactions with them that they acknowledge the catalytic role open-source software and hardware can have.
Also it was imported by copying the modified source instead of proper git fork with history and all the contributors that made it possible.
Since i3 was designed, there were always parts that weren't open (like the pictured PCB heated bed) so nothing really changes.
It sounds like Prusa doesn't understand that central premise, or is coming to terms with how hostile open source is to traditional business models.
Another reply to Josef Průša - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35404374
Comments are right that bans of that sort are pretty much definitionally not "open source," and Prusa would be wrong to use that term if they went down this path. I think, though, that there should definitely be a space for companies that want to preserve their copyright but also be very open with their hardware and software. It'd just need a different word.
I also see a lot of FUD from the Prusa community regarding that particular brand, where you can't claim it's a 1:1 Prusa clone. Even the remarks from Josef Prusa about speed or noise are targeted to the X1C or P1P printers while if you want to talk about clones and copying there are brands out there that fits the bill better e.g. Sovol 06.
The part where you can only sell "consumables" that must be verified by Prusa also has zero to do with open source or freedom.
On top of that, people still building an i3-design printer from scratch is rare, the hobbyist design community has moved on to the Vorons, which means pretty much all printers with this design are from companies with zero community interaction, profiting from the Prusa investments. So I get why they're not happy.
The only real comparison you have with Prusa is the much less popular RatRig - which is still an opensource design afaik, but I'm not aware of any clones of those.
There's lots of i3 clones with various changes that are open. But that it exists doesn't mean it'll be incorporated.
I've seen for instance multiple i3 clone designs with multiple extruders -- one with them side by side, another one with two extruders on the X axis.
There's also all sorts of construction alternatives -- wood, laser cut metal frames, etc.
The issue may be that lots of the clones are mostly minor branding/advanced feature changes. Prusa as far as I know doesn't offer an IDEX printer. I'm sure they could take one of the existing designs, but perhaps they just don't want to because it's an unusual, fiddly feature.
There is still a space for a high performance prosumer coreXY printer like the Bambu or the Voron, but Prusa dropped the ball on this with the XL where they could have dominated. The Bambu is just a massive refinement of the FDM printer.
I predict the next big leaps in 3D printing will be:
- Tool changers like the Prusa XL. I would have bought a MK3 sized printer with 2-3 tool heads instantly. Prusa still has a shot here. Printing in multicolours is nice. But frankly I don't care about printing toys in multicolour. I'd rather be able to design in multi materials. Imagine being able to print in PLA, PETG, TPU simultaneously reliably.
- Infinite Z axis. I backed the Creality CR-30. Creality is a shit company and really dropped the ball on this. Eventually with community support and tinkering I got mine to work well. It's no where near the quality of my MK3s, but where appropriate, I can design things to work well on a conveyor belt and not bother with stopping to pull things off. Shove a box at the end, put it on the network and you have a truly automated manufacturing system. I can print 10 of something without pausing. And one failure won't effect the other 9.
- Pellets instead of fillament. Easier to handle, easier to refill and makes recycling filament easier.
E3D has driven the majority of hotend innovation, not Prusa. Ultimaker's Cura and PrusaSlicer cross pollinate regularly. Grégoire Saunier created the Bear frame. Numerous other nonprofessionals are creating small and not-so-small improvements which haven't become well known.
But yes, the bedflinger FDM architecture is mature. Innovation is incremental now, not radical.
You know, a pretty low bar for a product to be considered functional.
The machine was flawless from day one even in the hands of a complete novice like me. The upgrade was also flawless.
This times I've had bad prints? I changed filaments without understanding how it behaves. I printed things without understanding how to prepare the print, and it fell over. Attempting to print flexibles.
These issues may or may not plague you depending on your use case. I mostly print mechanical parts that I design myself. And I use limited types of filaments for prototyping. So can I get 100 out of 100 successful prints? Yes, that's quite achievable.
3D printers are the same. it's a mechanical thing which involves heat and lubrication and motors. It's never going to be "without issue".
3D Printers are a lot better than they used to be though - if you buy a good one it will be immediately useful and require minimal maintenance. Those are the things Prusa is good at.
They are certainly useful machines, I was skeptical at first but I finally got one and found many uses for it. Some are more reliable than others, but you still have to think of them as tools like you find in a workshop, or a sewing machine, and that need some skill and involvement to operate. They are also best used as such. The biggest value in 3D printers is to make things that don't exist to fit your specific needs, they are no replacement for mass production, in the same way people usually don't use an office printer to print a book they can find at a local bookstore, and this is will never be one click easy, just as writing a book is not easy.
I guess that some "industrial"-grade printers like Ultimaker should be better in that regard, but I'm not sure about that.
Not every 2D printer is good either. I have Epson printer which refused to print stuff after few months of downtime. I managed to recover it by doing some "cleaning nozzle" procedure, but I don't think it was guaranteed to work. Though it was my failure because I was hooked on this promise "buy ink not proprietary cartridge with chip". I'd better buy ordinary HP laser jet with proprietary cartridge instead, those inkjet printers are not well suited for my use-case (printing few pages once a year).
Free Openness, reliability, trustworthiness - that's what I paid a multiple for.
Joseph puts his name on every machine, every spool of filament. I trust that if and when something goes wrong, it's his neck on the line to make it right.
I welcome a newer, stronger, toothier approach to Free and Open hardware and software.
If that means a patent trust, or a consortium for enforcement, or whatever collaboration between large players can become, it would be great if this could be the catalyst.
But where is the innovation? Where are the alternatives?
Is there simply not enough money in cheap 3D printing to justify investment?
With Voron/Bambu lab/Prusa XL, the next-gen is arriving right now. Let's see...
For art pieces I often print using a mixture of the two then join them together, such as a bust with the head, I’ll make the head in resin and the body in FDM.
The printers are dead simple to use too compared to all the hassle of FDM printing. Very few moving parts means very few opportunities for the myriad mistakes that seem inherent in FDM printing.
The results can be nice, but they may not be the best choice for many users.
Your immune system starts recognizing it as a foreign body and suddenly you develop an allergy against the resin which can result in quite severe symptoms.
I don't own a 3D printer, but I wonder why pellet extruders are not a standard for feeding these FDM machines. This apparent lack of interest has an effect on the price of the excessively overpriced and seemingly amateurish pellet extruders that seem to exist at the moment (of which there seem to be only two or three models?).
We are talking about a significant price difference in the cost of consumables in pellet form, humidity of the material and mixing control, and the ability to reuse material from failed prints or everyday items, among the first things that cross my mind.
it's been like this for nearly a decade as you said, and the common extruder usually doesn't even include an acceleration sensor.
* One problem is rigidity/vibration. This is solved by lots of rigid mass, which isn't consumer friendly. It makes for a big, heavy, expensive machine.
* Another problem is the lack of feedback. This is solved by having accurate sensing of positioning. This costs money.
* Another problem is temperature management. This requires an enclosure and parts that don't mind the heat. This takes space and costs money.
* Another problem is extrusion consistency. This either requires very accurately manufactured plastic as an input, or excellent sensing of what's going into the extruder. This also costs money.
And most of these are polish on top. Like you can drop $700 on a very decent printer, or you could spend $5000 on one that mostly does the same thing, except is less fiddly because it's got a lot more steel and sensors in it. That makes sense if you're running a business, not so much if you rarely want to make stuff out of plastic.
Some of these are being slowly addressed in quite unorthodox ways. Eg, some sensing issues are being addressed with fancy motor drivers that can tell when the motor has gotten stuck.
There's also that resin gets way better precision and fixes many of these issues for way cheaper. It's got its own downsides of course, but it does mean that the amount of people who really need a very solid FDM printer is smaller than you might think.
I've been very happy with ZSA for example, and they've done it right in my opinion.
Hopefully more companies work on making their stuff open standards with strong centralized production for those that don't want to build it themselves rather than arbiters of what can and cannot be reproduced by 3rd parties.
Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.
The random chips are their competitive advantage - Intel chips are notoriously power-inefficient, and AMD chips are still x86 which is an inefficient architecture. The only difference is that you can't build your own M2 computer, which isn't exactly moving any goalposts besides Apple opening themselves up to the grueling, low-margin work of setting up logistics for their different SKUs of chips, working with board partners to define specifications, and dealing with supporting the utterly random hardware people plug into their PCIe lanes (Macs 'work' in that Apple has rigorous test cases for 99% of scenarios; Windows had so many driver problems throughout Windows 7, 8, and 10 because MSFT to maintain backwards compatibility for components from 2002; this is why W11 has mostly dropped official support for older CPUs).
And yes, not being able to make your own M2 computer does make the chip less open.
Open-ness is a scale, and if you're going to call something "open-source hardware" you should be able to source the hardware entirely yourself. Not being able to do that is closed hardware.
EDIT: clarified the "mostly"
That's part of the reason why my ZSA gear is gathering dust in silence, but my Prusa gear runs 24 hours a day and everyone who will listen knows about it.
Principles matter.
I happily pay money to companies who provide a lot of additional value on top of open source offering. I have moonlander, zsa platform, ergodox ez. When ZSA (inevitably, as for me) will release concave moonlander, I'm going to buy it too...