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Comment by arcanemachiner | Hacker News Reader

The article refers to getting "Behringer'd". Can anyone tell me what that means?

Behringer has frequently cloned both out of production and in production music instruments and equipment. They are very controversial, some which is not helped by the company's CEO, who is the namesake of the company.

In the synth world, they have released out of production, extremely rare, and extremely expensive synthesizers. I think in most cases, they aren't necessarily copying so much as re-releasing because they are often products that the original manufacturer either refuses to or can't (in terms of lacking the engineering capability) re-release. And sometimes, the original company is not even around anymore. Behringer has its own chip manufacturing, which helps it achieve low costs. But they do also directly copy active and on the market products. These are much less justifiable.

I think the phrase refers to Behringer, a German audio/synth equipment company that pumped out cheap eurotrack + modular synth components. I'm not a synth person (and forget how I even know about this), so I looked around for a more authoritative recap and found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/onllk0/synthesi...

Didn't know /r/HobbyDrama existed either. What a world!

My hot take is that in the consumer commodity market, Prusa is losing market share to Chinese competitors. Consumers are extremely fickle and price-sensitive. What I think is interesting is that Prusa also has market share among small/medium manufacturing shops - although I have no idea if this segment is growing or shrinking. The strengths behind the Prusa brand (open-source ethos, reliable work horse machines, longevity) make Prusa a clear winner if I need to allocate capital for 20x 3d printers in the ~25cm build volume category.

I see Prusa XL as an important stake in the large-format B2B 3D printer services market, and it makes sense that consumers aren't 100% satisfied with the current developments (large-format 3D printers are historically not oriented for the consumer market). I think it's exceptional that Prusa is applying their open source ethos to large-format 3D printing, which tend to be closed software/hardware ecosystems with a retail price tag of 5-10k USD.

There’s an entire paragraph midway through the article that explains it well.

A similar sentiment is echoed in the post A reply to Josef Průša by Stargirl Flowers, but this time in regards to Uli Behringer. This despite Behringer engaging in the historically progressive task of cheapening audio hardware by copying other designs and manufaturing and marketing them at scale (putting aside Behringer's litigious behavior). Stargirl calls this competition "parasitic", despite also citing the proliferation of Stratocaster clones and the benefit thereof to musicians.

Lower cost adequate quality clones coming out and eating in to your core business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behringer

Behringer products are often half the price of other audio gear and have a matching reputation for suspect quality.

https://www.reddit.com/r/audioengineering/comments/6bqb18/ar...

Quoting a Reddit post from 6 years ago isn't super great: Behringer got A LOT better in the last 5 years to the point where they're now just a "you get what you pay for" cheaper alternatives to otherwise unaffordable gear.

That doesn’t change the fact about how they got there, stealing intellectual property.

Copying isn't theft, it's why it's a different word.

And it's especially not theft when the products are made and sold in a western country that has a much more sane patent system than the US: if your product isn't registered in Germany, any German person can legally create their own copy for the German market, as rightly they should. And then the US can put an import ban in place for those products because if they were sold in the US they would be infringing on the patent holder's right to market. Again, as rightly they should.

And lo and behold, thus it came to pass, and no markets were actually impacted.

(and as fun, related trivia: look up the Samwer brothers. Because there is no such thing as international patent law, there is only "you get to register in every jurisdiction you want your brand protected in" and if you don't, then anyone is free to clone your product, because you gave them permission to do so. Whether you like that or not.)

GPT4: "Getting "Behringer'd" is a term used in the context of this article to describe a situation where a company copies the design of another company's product, manufactures it at a lower cost, and sells it at a cheaper price. This term is derived from the practices of the audio equipment company Behringer, which is known for producing affordable versions of popular and often expensive audio gear by replicating their designs. In the article, the author suggests that if Prusa Research chooses to keep its electronics closed, it might face competition from others who would create open replacement boards – essentially getting "Behringer'd"."

People may be reacting negatively to your comment because it quotes a language model verbatim, with no context or analysis.

You can probably understand why that might not be considered a constructive contribution to most discussions.

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