A Reply to Josef Průša
blog.thea.codes
blog.thea.codes
I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones?
Would you call it “intentionally exploitative” if I build the linux kernel on my computer?
They willingly, and without any coercion choose a licence which let anyone build and sell a clone of their product. Let’s not pretend that those who then go and do that following all the licence requirements are somehow bad.
It’s one thing to take a design, modify it/improve it, and sell it.
It’s another to wait for someone with a good reputation to design something good (with all the costs that entails), make a perfect clone, and sell it as a perfect clone for much less because you didn’t have to pay for the R&D.
You’re right. It’s 100% license compliant. But it sucks and isn’t fair play.
So people go closed (Makerbot) or delay releasing things (Prusa). Doing all the R&D and letting someone else to take the sales isn’t a sustainable model for a business.
What else are they to do? They can’t survive selling consumables. Their stuff is great but others (often with worse quality) will always undercut that too.
I don’t have an answer. Their choice (or very similar) is the best option I can think of. Sell thing X, open source X-1. Or at least wait until most R&D on X is paid.
The creator specifically said it was OK to do exactly those things! Maybe not in those words, but definitely in the words of the license under which it was released.
Now, if the creator was saying "I got bad advice on this and didn't realize the implications, now that I do my subsequent projects will be closed" I'd have more sympathy.
But they're not saying that, they (and you) are arguing that people who look at the project, understand the license, and produce a derivative work that meets the terms of the license are doing something wrong. And that's not the case either morally, ethically, or legally.
Lots of open source people go with an open source license not for free labor or goodwill, but because they think it's the right thing to do.
Any engineer can build a bridge. Only a good engineer can build a bridge that meets all the user requirements, while not massively overengineering the structure (and hence the budget).
They typically cut just the right corners to make a still functional product at a vastly reduced price.
And for that, the clone-makers are, IMO, contributing to the ecosystem. The original product could adjust their design to get the same savings, and either pass the savings onto the customers, or take the extra as profit.
Prusa's machines are expensive but by and large "just work", and keep on working, and have a strong reputation for this, backed by them eating their own dogfood, producing printers with their printers.
The clones are almost always require a lot of tweaking/fixes/upgrades and aren't durable or reliable. Some of them are downright dangerous in terms of being fire hazards, with things like heater bed wires that fray and short out, underspec'd electronics that overheat, shitty firmware, etc.
He's got a thousand (mostly) Chinese copycatters who immediately download the design, figure out how to squeeze every penny out of the BOM, modify it slightly to give their marketing people something to brag about being "better" (as well as try and force people to go to them, and only them, for replacement parts), and print money from tens of thousands of people on reddit and Facebook 3d printing forums who think they're scoring some sort of great deal. None of these people are adding anything of value; in fact, all the effort spent fixing the shitty clones that are very poorly supported, probably results in millions of person-hours wasted.
If I were Prusa, I'd be exhausted, too. It's not an understatement to say that he has been not-quite-single-handedly carrying the hardware side of the enthusiast/cottage-industry FDM market for well over a decade. Sure, you have the corexy and delta designs, but they're definitely a minority.
Knockoff producers will figure it out anyway, that's their entire business and they're good at it.
The only people hurt are the actual customers, who probably don't have as much experience reverse-engineering.
You want the cheapest shit without any innovation, you'll sooner or later get your wish.
If your goal is just to collectively punish all consumers, maybe just get out of the business of selling stuff, because that's pretty toxic.
He tries to complain about other people's character but that attitude exposed right there is worse.
Closing up your ip only hurts your own customers and turns some who might have been customers away. It does not create a single new customer or increase any good will.
These companies get their start 100% thanks to open source, then decide they don't like it any more after they get off the ground. I will somehow survive just fine while never buying any of e3d's new Revo stuff. It's cool, but you know, it's not cool enough to compete with open-ended infinity.
Or Slice. Slice trying to claim patent on freaking textbook basics.
These guys have absolutely no argument for all their crying.
What they call parasites are what I call the rest of an entire ecosystem, and no one gets to live without a big ecosystem to live within.
I guess I'm pretty much just repeating the article. She's right on.
Not that I see how the critics are whining anyway.
He makes the charge that someone else is bad because why exactly? Because they don't "give back"? Whatever that is supposed to mean. So how is he different? Oh right, because he produces hardware and software that other people can use. Except now he doesn't want to do that any more. So, he is becoming exactly the people he just said are bad. Now tell me he's different because he makes his own new stuff instead of copying.
Whining indeed. I call projection whiner.
In fact it's not un understatement, it's plainly a false statement. Nothing of Prusa is an original Idea, everything has come from the community and they have refined and calibrated it. The differentiating factor Prusa Had was a pre-calibrated Printer and more quality control on the parts. If you rigtly say that the refinement is the important part, there's plenty of refinement on various things also on the "clones"
Say the magnetic bed and the elimination of bed springs. Or where exactly stepper motors are placed. Details of cooling fan ducting.
If you add good calibration to that you end up with a very well working printer.
this means that if you copy it exactly the printer will work well even with inferior parts. So companies that are cheap and innovate are punished and do not know why exactly.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
You safe in lavour costs, safety standards, environmental protection, e.t.c.
This is one of the few cases where import tax should do it's job at protecting local economy. Tax it so that the chinese clone costs the same as the locally and ethically produced original.
Do I think we should curb globalisation, and encourage local production and innovation (protecting both lulzbot and prusa)? Yeah, but that's an orthogonal discussion for another day.
Do I think that we should encourage local production? Yes. At the expense of affordability for the common people? Hell no. I don't care where John Doe got his first Hobby printer and if encouraging local production comes at the expense of less people having a chance to use the technology that is a net negative. Prusa himself Got into this business because of the affordability of the Reprap project. I Want other people to be able to dip their toes into new areas and maybe become the next Prusa, but if the entry price into the new field is equal to the monthly salary how many (and especially how many students) can afford to try and do so?
With software, it costs nothing to just git clone and build for your personal use (which also presents its own funding challenges). For hardware, there's gonna be a chunk of people who just want the product/functionality via clones, and you need to be careful to keep the community/project to grow sustainably. IMO, it should be along-side and not in spite of those clones, but you can see the frustration.
To get a Patent you have to apply to the patent Office, pass several conditions about originality etc) where as to get a copyright you just slap it to your work although the work in this case needs to be creative and not physical.
Open source licensing originated with copyright because, in the US, it is not possible to release something into the public domain. Your copyright is automatic and you can't renounce it.
OSS licenses are an attempt to leverage copyright law in order to accomplish something that approximates the important features of putting something in the public domain.
This is not necessary with patents, because nothing is automatically patented and you can absolutely renounce patents.
That said, as OSS licenses evolved, they became more than trying to approximate putting things in the public domain. They started to carve out a space that isn't fully public domain, but also isn't fully proprietary.
It's this sort of licensing that could have huge value with hardware. And that licensing would rest on the legal rights of having a patent, just like how with software, it rests on the legal rights of having copyright.
So, in the end, the principle is the same regardless of whether the underpinnings is copyright or patent.
Although, since (unlike copyright), patents actually have a reasonably short lifespan, this effort is less necessary with hardware. It's entirely feasible just to wait until the patents expire and they enter the public domain.
This sounds more like Josef and perhaps the author have a romantic idea about open source but now dislike the realities. There’s no way you can get people to pinky swear to not use the rights in the license you chose. There are so many cases of millions or billions of dollars being generated through companies built on open source software. To not expect the same of hardware is unrealistic.
I’m not an expert on synthesizers but it sounds more like reverse engineering than building from open source and permissive licenses. I don’t think that’s the right lens to think about the reproductions.
If Prusa doesn’t want this then they need to close their licenses and stop talking about being open. That’s ok, it’s their business after all. I just expect that becoming “source available” will have its own set of thorns for the brand that has been built.
The irony of course is that the GPL was started due to… closed source printers.
You think probably one of the most famous open source hardware designers has "romantic ideas about open source" and somehow you, dear random HN commenter, are wiser?
It's more like: Josef has been trying to carry the mantle of open source hardware and has finally had enough of manufacturers leeching off him, making piles of money, not contributing anything back, and worse: the 3d printing community not just tolerating it, but gleefully funding the people not contributing anything back.
People get riled up when Linksys or Netgear won't release source code, but Ender and others copy Prusa's designs and...everyone cheers and runs out to buy it.
Of course the poor man is fed up.
In this case Prusa is riled up because people are following the license for their source code and design. They make 1:1 copies using GPL3 code.
This isn’t about wisdom, it’s about selecting the correct license and understanding the repercussions. This is why AGPL exists. This is why hardware specific licenses exist.
I don’t mind them going closed source, personally. However, It’s important to be clear that using GPL code to build and distribute devices is 100% in line with the license.
I know where there's a bunch of IP lawyers out there. They just cost a lot of money. Licenses that aren't enforced aren't.
Anyone who's been in the 3D Printing community for a while understands the expectation. It used to be that designs and concepts were shared and expanded on. Hotend and nozzle designs were shared. Techniques for assembling hotends. The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles. People parlayed that into ebay stores and a few businesses popped up. Businesses where the seller of the board was also the designer.
To folks who were part of that, someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin seems disingenuous. They're not introducing meaningful changes. This person (or people) did this work, and tried to contribute it to the community, and they show up to make a quick buck off their work.
We expect everyone to act in good faith, but were limited by the licenses we had to lean on at the time. Clearly though, complying with a license is not a reasonable measure of whether someone is doing something good or bad.
It's important that licenses permit broadly rather than trying to set a tight boundary because if you get wrapped up in litigation over the boundary it can result in life destroying expenses. Prudent people should stay well away from the harry edge to avoid unnecessary risk.
Whining about behavior you consider anti-social is a perfectly valid mechanism to push for change in the world and compared to tight licenses and litigation much less costly and less likely to cause collateral damage.
Now I am a huge proponent of open source and I think it’s important to make it work. But I wanted to point out that this idea of additional expectations is going to be difficult to find traction with in China.
Also we did have luck forcing Creality to release their source code once it was found that they violated the GPL.
As long as someone else's derivative work is properly compliant with the license under which the original work was released, the creator of the original work--who chose the license!--has no standing to complain. If they didn't game out this possible outcome that's on them.
Trying to insist that random strangers have to conform to the norms of a community of which they're not a part in addition to conforming to their legal obligations is practically delusional.
If someone takes an open design, makes a 1:1 copy, sells it just undercutting the people that put resources into designing it-- the eventual result of that trend continued is that future versions aren't going to be open anymore.
Call them delusional if you like but people complaining about anti-social behavior that undermines the public good are effective-- if they weren't you presumably wouldn't have seen any reason to comment at all. :P
There are plenty of people creating open hardware for whom “someone else made a run of these and is selling them cheaply” is actually an intended result—and why they picked a license that allows it—and this actually encourages them to do more, because it means more people will actually be able to use their design.
I get that motives other than profit maximization are alien to some Hackernews but really, the problem here is Prusa (and others) not being aligned with the actual meaning of releasing something openly. It’s not a problem with the people following the license.
Sure there are devices where people are asking others to churn them out specifically because they don't have a business selling them. That isn't the case here and extensively zero value add price undercutting cloning will cause further development to not be open. That outcome is unambiguously harmful to the public.
Which is exactly what Prusa has done.
Contractually speaking, you're correct. However, there was also a standard social expectation in the community. The sad part of this whole thing isn't the licensing issue, it's the fact that this is marking the end of the "golden age" of the community.
I'd have not lost respect for Prusa if the statement had been, "Unfortunately, I'm not making enough from this to continue doing it as fully open hardware, sorry." Instead the statement reads as, effectively, "Others are stealing from me, so I can't make more fully open hardware, sorry." And that's wrong--he gave it to them, they didn't steal it!
In my opinion, Prusa is what Makerbot was supposed to be. But it now seems that Prusa is struggling under the same trials that Makerbot faced before it.
https://www.makerbot.com/stories/2010/03/25/open-source-ethi...
Not long after that, they went full closed-source (and got bought out by Stratasys for a fortune).
I'm sure Josef Prusa remembers that as well. I very much hope this isn't a sign that Prusa will make a similar pivot. I don't expect that it is.
Because they really aren't that much better than Artillery or Creality (and probably others), just at double the price, usually.
> The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles.
These all sound like examples of
> someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin
What's being added sounds like just manufacturing ability, which comes with scale from increased demand.
If you don't want that to be possible, please stop saying "open source". Ideally, please stop saying "open" too.
Imagine someone in the early days had been able to manufacture whole machines from scratch at decent prices. That would have probably been desirable, lots of people would have bought them.
You can be bitter about person putting a lot of effort into X not getting (enough) monetary compensation, but this line of thinking is in direct conflict with the communal "open source hardware" thinking.
That’s the core problem of the “licenses are the alpha and omega of open source” crowd.
I released my book How To Open Source (dot dev) with a license that doesn’t make it illegal to share with a struggling friend or an educator. It is CC (NC/SA) because there isn’t a license that perfectly describes my wishes and that was the best one. On the day of my announcement someone on /r/opensource took great glee in this loophole as they saw it. And proclaimed they would repost the whole thing in the announcement thread.
Laurence Lessig, creator of the CC license, inherently saw communities as more than licenses. In his book Code he identifies Laws, norms, markets, and technology as influencing community behavior.
While I agree you shouldn’t be a mind reader, we also cannot expect communities to be based on licenses and laws alone.
The problem is reciprocity, and they're trying to find a technical setup (a license) to help solve it. You're right that they may have failed, which is the reason of the change in course.
If you then sold/gave it away as "Krisoft OS" then I think most people would see that as exploiting the nature of open source software/hardware, even if not exactly against the letter of the license.
Ultimately, Linux is released under the GPL. That gives end users several rights, including the right to repackage it and re-sell it. People do that all the time. Android, Tizen, Maemo, Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat - not to mention the tens of thousands of custom Linux distros powering all sorts of embedded devices. That's the terms of the license.
You can either sell to that group and accept the cloning, or not sell to that group by going proprietary and making cloning more difficult.
Rather, offer people the option to sign a little contract in order to use it. Keep the barrier as low as possible, an email exchange should be enough. I feel in the hardware world the barriers are already pretty high and people want to know your detailed business plan, your mother's maiden name and a couple of references before they even share a data sheet. You just want to have an address and make sure they know what they are agreeing to. Keeping honest people honest and so on.
If "the Chinese" want to clone your product, then you are often out of luck anyway. Although that is not entirely true anymore, my previous company fought in China against clones and IP theft a couple times and won. But you need to have a local presence, a local subsidary that can hire lawyers etc.. If you are just outsourcing production to third parties then it gets problematic.
This is the take I think people are missing. If you are in a spot where "the Chinese" or any other company can cut you out, then I'm in the box that you are producing anything unique. Which was/is not true for Prusa, since even though there are clones that can be had by 1/4th of the price; people sure trust the name of Prusa to order directly from them. This is why they are the most sold printer of all time, their name is a mark of quality.
I think the main problem that now started to get them all fired up is the rise of other companies who can also provide that experience (buying something out of the shelf and start printing with it without turning this into a fully fledged hobby to learn the mechanics). Bambu Lab not only did innovate on it but also started to provide that convience for the same price, obviously they had to go cheaper in order to start obtaining market share but with true innovation they can still sell advanced printers that are maybe 1.5X in price but 2-3X worth in the capabilities compared to the Prusa (while also providing cheaper options). Now the game is who is going to dominate which sector (low end consumers [price] / high end prosumers [innovation]). If I were Prusa I'd try to aim high but not sure how well equipped are they to catch up to other printers.
As a lawyer friend of mine put it, when working between academics and industry in other countries: "Contracts and licenses are not deflector shields. You have to be willing to sue in that country. If you don't trust your partners, a piece of paper isn't going to fix that."
Each Prusa printer has some of its price premium attributable to "We like Joseph Prusa", and a lot (but not all) of that comes down to being open source.
Edit: I have seen enough parts of open source projects incorporated in commercial projects without any credits and ignoring all licenses. Chance of being caught and punished is in most cases zero.
Edit2: I work for a big corp right now and that’s first workplace who cares about using open source code from Internet. All the smaller owner led companies were happy copying code and accelerating development despite restrictive licenses. I asked the bosses about this and it was just laughing all the time.
This way authors could be decently compensated.
Reverse engineers overseas don't need schematics, but hobbyist users do.
IBM used to include complete schematics and BIOS assembly code in their manuals.
Apple has a history of making it very difficult to repair their devices due to locking up schematics and parts.
Although this is orthogonal to the open source question. You can (and, I argue, should) release all of that data while still operating under a proprietary license.
"I believe Prusa has succeeded because of its community, not because of its printers."
a bit harsh. If they hadn't made good printers there would be that community in the first place.
Perhaps you could replace community with ecosystem in that sentence.
I stepped away from FDM printers and onto Formlabs' STL printers around when U2 ruled (not exactly a move to greener pastures, they're closed-source all the way), seems like a lot has changed since I left as no-one is even mentioning Ultimaker or Lulzbot. I'm just kinda disappointed and bummed to see Ender of Creality and other Chinese printers enjoying increasing prominence considering their flagrant and persistent GPL violations.
I'm not trying to minimise the improvement that Prusa Contributed back but Prusa is making it sound like they created the segment and everyone is profiting from their work.
Obvious example, Arduino, which used to stand for Italian Manufacturing and fair wages. Well, that ain't going to be the cheapest thing on Amazon, so now buying a genuine Arduino is both more expensive, not the first recommendation if you search for "Arduino," and a guessing game if you are going to get a counterfeit. Almost everything recommended is ELEGOO, which in my experience is functional but I have had problems in the past with their bootloaders, which I cannot imagine how intimidating that would be for a newcomer.
This is an issue especially when the company open-sourcing their work is trying to boost a local, non-Chinese economy. Whether it be Arduino in Italy or Prusa in the Czech Republic; Chinese manufacturing is all-to-happy to take the plans, churn out clones, and not even open-source the code (let alone the hardware) changes they made. And, I actually, agree with Prusa and think we should not let them do that. I don't know how much they should be required to contribute; but right now it is theft from both the designer (Prusa) and the employees that would have been employed if their design hadn't been ripped off. How many people would be employed with good wages and conditions and were not because cheap, low quality, Chinese labor was willing to fill the void?
Yet they still have problems with Chinese manufacturers. They will swap components or make changes making designs worse, then sell the meaningfully inferior product under the name of the open source product.
This has lead to open source creators, with no profit incentive, still pushing against what are functionally counterfeit clones.
Both pieces where lacking some item to complete them, didnt even bother to ask for a refund but ffs dafuq is going on over dere
Instead, they see it as license to engage in a race to the bottom against the own creator of the design, using cheap manufacturing as a weapon. It is, in my opinion, disgustingly unethical.
This is why we can’t have nice things. It’s also why, even myself, I have sadly resolved that if I ever succeed in making some massive project open-source, it will only be Source-Available.
I didn't realize it until a few years ago, but this has been going on for a long time... But with regular commercial for-profit companies. Something like 30% of the original ideas for companies products come from hobbyists. They make a solution to their problems, and give the idea away for free. A company comes along and uses the idea to develop a business. Sometime they even patent the idea and lock out the original inventor. But the original inventor gets nothing.
The best example I've heard was those circular irrigation systems where there is one well sunk, and these big wheels that roll around it. They are hard to miss seeing from an airplane. It was originally a farmer on marginal land that come up with the idea.
There was an academic paper on commercial business appropriating hobbyist ideas that made the rounds a few years ago. I don't remember the details... Hopefully someone else remember it better than I do and can provide a link.
None of those are perfect, but it’s better than Creality selling Prusa clones in every Micro Center.
Prusa i3 themselves are evolutions of the reprap Mendel design, so I'm not sure if it's fair calling creality enders prusa clones.
How well does that work and how often does that happen? In the last few years I've noticed more and more of a flood of Chinese stuff violating copyright that is openly sold on Amazon or Walmart. I feel like Amazon used to filter this better maybe pre-pandemic. And of course that's just US marketplaces, it's more and more common now for ordinary people to buy from AliExpress.
Bambu printers already have significant technological advantages over Prusa printers. The people there [at Bambu and other companies] aren't dumb - once bootstrapped by examining open source printers, they can and will learn to build good printers in their own right.
So when Prusa starts to become less open, which they inevitably must do if the premise is that there are companies that don't particularly care about foreign IP rights and licenses, then they just enter the rat race with companies that are quite frankly just better at making things for less money.
Maybe it is just financially unviable to be the open source standard bearer, but in that case it's likely just financially unviable for the company to exist.
If you don’t want people to do something, then don’t tell them they can do it, legal permission and all. If the license was chosen allows them to do it, you can’t be surprised or shocked when someone does it. Making a clone isn’t theft. That appeared to be part of his point.
Unsurprisingly, giving the consumer what they want for cheaper is a good way to loose sales. Foot meet gun, loaded with non-philosophical ammo. The first patent was filed in 1447 for a reason.
American programmers are happy to take free software, make a profit on it and not even open source changes they made.
I, personally, bought Prusa because it was claimed to be open source and I wanted to support it, as I respect those who go open source way, however hard it is. As it's no longer is, I probably would choose another printer next time, as I don't really care about Czech economy.
Presumably, the Chinese employees are not paid or treated well. But that is not a given. Nor is it a given that the Italian employees are paid or treated well.
How about we bar the sale of any product domestically unless its manufacture has been certified to conform with local regulations regarding labor, environmental protections, etc.? Thus, a U.S. company would have to pay to get certified before they could sell in Italy. And they would have to pay for surprise inspections, etc. to assure compliance. An Italian company would also have to be certified and subject to surprise inspections, but might not have to pay for those directly if Italian taxpayers are willing to cover the costs. For that matter, they may also choose to cover the costs for Chinese manufacturers.
If you are objecting to the unfairness of having to compete under different rules, let's address that. If the complaint is that one party pays for the R&D while another party reaps the profit, let's address that. These are not the same issue. If the complaint is that people prefer to pay less for an inferior product, that is also a different issue.
> The Arduino project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Italy, aiming to provide a low-cost and easy way for novices and professionals to create devices that interact with their environment using sensors and actuators.
The main Purpose was "easy and low-cost access to create devices". By that measure Every chinese Clone has helped in that purpose. The fact that their Original Arduino was produced in Italy to also support local Business was secondary to the main purpose and it can be said that it was in conflict with the main purpose. Sure 35 Eur is not much for Italy, but a cheaper product reached a much more wider audience who starts with cheaper products and then gains enough knowledge to appreciate the why of the original. (better quality control, better parts, more reliable etc). All this factors come after you have dipped your toes, for which the clones has been a crucial factor.
The same holds true for Prusa. Most of the comunity of Prusa came initially from the reprap project, Prusa has benefited from their open Ideas and refined them and I know many in the community who have chosen Prusa instead of cheaper Variants only as giving back for them being open (though not exactly open development)
Later I found out that AliExpress sells clone Arduino Nanos for under $4 (https://github.com/timville85/TripleController#tested-parts), but by this time I had already bought three Picos and was learning to program the USB stack, PIO, and microcontroller gdb using a second Pico (not sure if ESP8266 or ESP32 requires a JTAG to debug, or you can use gdb over serial like https://arduino-esp8266.readthedocs.io/en/latest/gdb.html).
Having said that, I think what hurts Prusa the most is their inability to keep up with demand from the US. The cheap clones win because they're still cheaper after Amazon same-day delivery. With Prusa, ordering a 3D printer is a "if you're really lucky, you might have one in a couple months" situation. This is costing them way more revenue than people cloning their motherboards. If they could sell to the US market efficiently, they would be making so much money they probably wouldn't even realize a couple of Aliexpress stores were selling outright clones.
(I indeed started my 3D printing adventure with a cheap printer that shipped to me overnight. And regretted every moment with that god awful piece of shit. At that point, I knew it was time to get something good, and it was well worth the 3 or 4 months I waited for an i3. But, most people give up much sooner than me.
I'm also going to insert a random story here; I ended up rebuilding that printer with my own design for most of the parts, saving only the enclosure and motion system. After probably 60 hours spent on that project, it still prints terribly because the design of the bed is intrinsically flawed. The original manufacturer works around that by having you manually level the bed at 20 mesh points, and then printing a 30 gram raft over the course of an hour to give your actual print a level bed. It is just terrible, and that's why I like Prusa. It doesn't do that.)
To me, Prusa has 3 selling points; they test their stuff before shipping it, the printers manufacture themselves (which gives you a feeling that they are accurate and reliable over time), and the entire stack is open source. If they remove one of those value props, I don't know if they're Prusa Research anymore. They're just one more anonymous manufacturer in a race to the bottom.
> Arduino literally opened their platform to competitors and flourished.
Arduino as a hardware manufacturer has collapsed in relevance in the last 5 years, in part because they were continually undercut by clones and similar/compatible hardware. In their case, it seems intentional, Arduino IDEs openly allow other manufacturers to add support for new boards. I think this was always the ethos of the Arduino project, so it’s hard to make a comparison to Prusa
The Arduino Idea to make device prototyping easier and cheaper flourished. It was a success and clones helped in that.
This is just pure wrong. Now, I'm willing to grant that the GPL might not be suited to hardware--hardware is generally patented, not copyrighted--if given a substantive analysis, but I note that commercial firmware-in-hardware is covered by the same copyright law and licenses that GPL is meant to deal with, so right at the outset this critique seems like gibberish, and if pursued looks set to produce a new poorly thought out problematic license.
> music equipment, where one asshole with a big factory is cloning and undercutting every popular product he can, including those by small open hardware designers.
Behringer makes high quality, good sounding, inexpensive music gear that makes great sound available to young and barely-professional musicians. Most musicians are classic "starving artists", and Behringer is selling them more affordable stuff than anybody else. Seems a strange market to attack. (Behringer mostly clones and modernizes "classic" synths from (say) the 70's and 80's, most of whose original designers are dead, and who made good money off them back in the day before selling out to soulless corporations, and models that aren't even available any more, hardly the poster children for being ripped off.
This are not clones they are more just look alike a with completely different sound profile and pairing process. So no, not open sourcing does help Apple to keep people from buying clones.
> People clone the hardware 1:1 with minimal changes
> Gets angry by it
wat
I mean, I get the frustration but why the fuck did you actually open sourced it in the first time, this is a hard surprised pikachu meme.
Open source or don't. Not half way, and don't go from open to closed unless you want to footgun your business. Sphinx search, CFEngine, and several others did this just before entering the dustbin of history.
Black when he was a nobody, these clones were, if anything, free advertising for a product nobody would have otherwise heard of.
But now he's well known, the clones just make it harder to profit off of his work.
Sucks that it's like that, but not at all surprising.
Beastie Boys had DRM-free .mp3s of Hot Sauce Committee on their website for a while.
Depends if you want to be cool or be a sell-out corporate band.
Rather than a prusa my guess would be that they would buy some other cheap printer instead. Then after a while they might appreciate what prusa is offering and potentially become a customer.
"Cheap knockoff" implies a significant degradation in quality, but the reality is that they are of equal quality, and lower price - the fact that Prusa is open source and has a good reputation as a brand can make up ground, but in the end many consumers mainly care about meeting a certain standard of performance, and then sorting by ascending price.
Prusa went from niche to fairly mainstream by being the printer that "just works". Mainstream is way more money than the enthusiast, hobby segment of the 3d printing market. So they would feel the burn from having those sales lost.
I'd guess the printer farm is paramount to prusas reliability. Don't know if anyone else runs something similar? If not for printing parts for their own printers having their own printer-service might be a good idea.
Prusas product cycle is slow which prevents them from keeping up with the competition. Now they have an answer to the latest an greatest versions of their knockoffs like ender s1 pros, but by the time Prusa is ready for their next refresh the market will be dominated by fast and cheap knockoffs of the bambulabs. I believe prusa is not winning this.
32 bit isn't really a feature in this context.
Wifi, sure. Not for me but I get that some would want it.
Not sure what keeping up means here, prusa is killing it and it felt like their sales was reflecting that too. But prusa might not agree.
I've looked at the competition and the only printer I'd consider over mk4 is a voron. But I don't want to spend that time on sourcing parts etc. And it would be understandable if the voron built with the tradeoffs for any one individual is going to have it's own type of quirks.
I'd rather spend time on designing and using my parts than on the printer. Wasn't always the case though! There was a time where a voron would be ideal for me.
Prusa printers are much too expensive for the quality they have (as compared to the market). And the company hasn't even been the "cutting edge" innovator for a long time, at least substantively. They probably learn as much as they give, from all those Chinese "clones" that might as well be open source because they aren't patented.
It's also curious for an open source advocate to complain about knock-off brands such as Ender and Behringer, when open source is lousy with projects that are knock offs -- sorry "open source versions" -- of commercial products.
1. Trade Secrets
2. Public Domain
Up until a year ago, Prusa was the clear leading 3d printer at their price point, giving them strong sales number at healthy margins.
Last year, a Chinese company founded by ex DJI employees (Bambi Lab) has created an innovative printer that matched/surpassed the Prusa lineup and at a very competitive price.
Prusa, struggling with delays at his own company, likely saw a significant drop in demand for his aging flagship product (Mk3S+). This, combined with the poor current economic state has likely put an actual existential risk for his company. He is actually referring to that in his post by creating an analogy to the solar market, where he claims that the entire market is Chinese due to “unfair”subsidies.
Bambu Lab was clearly building on top of Prusa’s innovations, such as cloning their slicer software. However, they were slow to comply by the GPL license. Prusa also seems to suspect that they have also leveraged other things that are harder to prove like their firmware and/or hardware.
Luckily, Prusa has just release two printers that seem very good on paper (the MK4 and XL), which should give them a healthy runway. However, Prusa is definitely at a point where he sees his differentiating feature melt away quickly by a motivated and highly capable competitor, and feels that he is not playing a fair game.
In my opinion, the solution is not what the author proposed. Prusa should arm themselves with stronger legal protections that allows them to better encourage reciprocal behavior. Fine idea I had is to have them be more aggressive at patenting their printers, but allow anyone to have a license to these patents as long as the licensee also poor idea their own patent portfolio at the same terms. This might not stop the exact clones, but those were never the real issue, as the author aptly point out. Other solutions such as what Prusa suggests are also reasonable, although I’m not sure how effective they will be.
At the end of the day, keeping Prusa completely open could definitely be an existential risk to the Prusa company, which would be an even worse blow to the 3d printing community.
The author of the post, Stargirl Flowers, is a woman btw.
It's weird to me that Prusa is bemoaning the state of open hardware in the 3D printer space right as he releases a CoreXY-kinematics based printer, a family of printer design that has been pushed almost exclusively by the volunteer community and small companies over the past half decade. The PrusaXL has taken quite a few learnings from the Voron community, V-Core's Ratrig, and all the other related open projects in that space.
I like Prusa and I like Prusa made printers, but it feels weird to me for him to say that they are keeping their designs closed source because the benefits received are one-way while the PrusaXL is shipping.
For a business open source can be about building mind-share. Businesses that have mind-share often want to build vendor lock-in, enough so at least to make a decent profit. But it's a struggle because the vendor lock-in can destroy the mind-share building. The best way forward isn't always obvious.
Many people discover this independently.
E3D has the same issues too with the Revo ppl are upset that it’s closed source but I think ultimately these companies will have a mix of open and closed source things (like v6 is opened source but revo is closed source)
You cant have "Look at how great our community is, and the open source spirit" while also shrieking like an entitled Karen that someone cloned your hardware that you explicitly allowed them to do.
Just because you're legally allowed to do something, doesn't mean that you can pretend it's ethical.
The law is not meant to regulate the entirety of human society and behavior, we're not robots, after all.
I am resigned to the fact that there is no intellectual property protection for software, hardware, or trademarks these days. I usually put the Apache 2 license on my projects, but what I am really intending is the "I know you're going to steal this and I can't do anything about it, so have fun" license. (There are licenses like this, but they cause a lot of trouble for organizations that do respect intellectual property. Apache 2 is acceptable to them and basically has the same effect.)
Ie. "Anyone who uses this printer design, or one based from it, must pay $3 to us per printer sold. We will give this permission to anyone who asks. For anyone who contributes back to the design of our printers, we will consider reducing this figure to $0"