Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?
josefprusa.com
josefprusa.com
All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.
It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.
This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.
Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations.
That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
So they sell a large part of their company to capital who can afford to acquire and defend IP. In this happy case they are only ground into 90% dust.
I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...
The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.
They need a drastic reform.
- protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,
- is too long, yes
- DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties
- the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original.
As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate.
And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none.
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More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.
That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.
The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
All are workable, but with their own tradeoffs.
Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.
I wonder who the people who show up to defend IP law are in these conversations. Why do it? What's the gain?
> laughs in Capitalism
You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point.
I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free.
Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them.
It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen.
Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood.
A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market.
No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.
* You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while.
* Everyone gets the work in the end.
We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.
... Yes.
It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.
It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux.
The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect.
Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).
The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).
I imagine a fine for egregious patents could also be implemented. If your patent is demonstrated in court to lack standing, the civil liability is on you, not the patent office.
The hard reality is that nobody actually knows a priori what innovation is. Or how much an innovation is actually worth. If you removed patents that would pretty easily and trivially stop the spam.
Lower cost = more patents = more patent trolls = less innovation.
While I sympathize with folks calling for weaker patents as an alternative solution, I think that's a non-starter given the power of entrenched interests.
If this were easily fixed, it would be fixed by now.
Best approach might be some OSS patent collective driven by community contributions and a legal team that heavily leverages things like AI to drive down costs. Even then, a big, well funded corp could just drain the coffers with a single, expensive legal battle.
The problem is the size difference between the applicants, and just saying "charge by their income" wouldn't help when a shell company with no income applies.
I 100% agree with you and luckily I think with AI this will rapidly change. The USPTO is bringing on as many AI tools as possible, as fast as they can. Similarly, we've built a product that can invalidate patents at scale, conduct prior art searches in 15 minutes what used to take weeks and thousands of dollars --
We and others in the space are rapidly gaining traction, so I suspect it's only a matter of time. I should also mention there are whole networks out there battling patent trolls (LOT Network) and others working on open source, etc.
There's no need to grant monopoly privileges. Rather, I favor market governed subsidies and grants for innovators to recoup the cost of their effort. The government will play a role in setting up the market and running it. This will be more democratic as people will have a voice to reward inventors for their efforts.
I expect this to be complimentary to innovations that will already arise.
One argument is that patents encourage innovation. The promise of a patent and the rewards to be gained act as a motivating force for ideas. Supposedly.
While not addressing the situation in the same way, here's my knee-jerk idea for defense against patent trolls:
"If you want to sue a person or an organization, you must pay the legal fees for the defendant, in an amount equal or greater to the amount of money being spent by the plaintiff on legal matters pertaining to the case."
So a small business would get full funding for defense, but it would cost them double to sue someone else. I'd say that's an excellent trade-off. This would dissuade not just patent trolls but any lawsuit where money would be the determining factor for victory.
The Achilles' heel would be enforcement, leading to a new subcategory of legal efforts to ensure compliance. But there's an opportunity for a net reduction in legal action.
It would be great if a bunch of courts could band together to setup a shared open source solution, but courts at the state level are pretty fractious. And the legal system is both pretty slow and pretty reluctant to change.
IP ownership is not inherently capital-intensive in the US.
And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?
Ie. Each side has 15 minutes to explain their side, then the jury has 15 minutes to discuss, then a vote is taken and a decision made.
Sure, some more subtle outcomes would be 'wrong' - but does it actually matter?
You're leaving out the part that there are a limited number of judges, and to be a good judge requires a LOT of education, a LOT of experience, and a LOT of time (in other words it's expensive to become a good judge and they need to be compensated to reflect the cost of becoming one).
Computers and Zoom don't change the fact our options are either: Put thousands of new unqualified people into positions of power (judges) Or continue with the current system where getting into a court is slow and expensive.
Unless you're planning on building an entirely new court system removed from the current one specifically for IP. To which I say: good luck, because it'll be a massive expansion of government that doesn't include lining the pockets of our current little dictator or his supporters so we'll hear about how we need to shrink government and reduce the debt.
Jury selection alone can take months…
And doesn’t solve the judge problem at all.
The backbone of the US economy are services and software, which depend a lot on IP. Deliberately or not, "low-value" American manufacturing was sacrificed for these high-margin industries[1]. AFAICT, it's impossible to turn back the clock on manufacturing without disadvantaging US software/services both on the legal regime and trade fronts
1. Which is why SWE salaries are higher in the US that RoW. I don't think trading high-salary service jobs for low-paying manufacturing is a good decision, but lots of people - including the current executive - think they can get it all. My working theory is Europe and China are not dumb and without agency and are just biding time for decoupling, should their manufacturing industries be undermined by US policy.
The real costs come from the US legal system being originally designed by and for agrarian villages of Saxons arguing with each other about who stole whose sheep, with the process handled in a more-or-less ad-hoc manner by village leaders for whom it's mostly a side responsibility, and the whole mess serving double duty as a source of community entertainment not unlike modern reality television.
A lot has changed over the past 1,000 years, but at it's core it's still a system that puts an incredible amount of focus on people arguing about Every. Single. Damned. Thing. No. Matter. How. Trivial. The really expensive parts of a lawsuit are the parts that create the most opportunity for this kind of bickering. Which is typically the parts that don't happen inside a courtroom. For example there's the discovery phase, which all by itself is so unusually complicated and expensive that it's spawned an entire multibillion dollar industry that basically only exists in English-speaking countries. And all the ancillary litigation over nitpicky procedural matters. And maybe other things, but those are the two that are the worst for being inherently expensive, easy to weaponize, and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.
Working as intended then
This is the frustrating thing about getting into an argument about how "IP isn't real property" and then having the other side roll their eyes at you like you are some naive ideologue. They're missing the point of what it means for IP to not be "real property". The actual point is understanding that you are, and will be, swimming against the current of the fundamentals of these technologies forever. It is very very difficult to make a digital book or movie that can't be copied. So difficult in fact, that it we've had to keep pushing the problem lower and lower into the system, with DRM protections at the hardware level. This is essentially expensive, not just from a capital perspective, but from a "focus and complexity" burden perspective as well. Then realize that even after putting this entire system in place, an entire trade block could arbitrarily decide to stop enforcing copyright, AKA, stop fueling the expensive apparatus that is is holding up the "physical property" facade for "intellectual property". This was actually being floated as a retaliation tactic during the peak of the tariff dispute with Canada[1]. And in fact we don't even need to go that far, it has of course always been the case that patents vary in practical enforceability country to country, and copyrights (despite an attempt to unify the rules globally) are also different country to country (the earliest TinTin is public domain in the US but not in the EU).
Usually at this point someone says "It's expensive to defend physical property too! See what happens if another country takes your cruise liner". But that's precisely the point, the difficulty scales with the item. I don't regularly have my chairs sitting in Russia for them to be nationalized. The entities that have large physical footprints are also the ones most likely to have the resources defend that property. This is simply not the case with "intellectual property," which has zero natural friction in spreading across the world, and certainly doesn't correlate with the "owner's" ability to "defend" it. This is due to the fundamental contradiction that "intellectual property" tries to establish: it wants all the the zero unit-cost and distribution benefits of "ethereal goods," with all the asset-like benefits of physical goods. It wants it both ways.
Notice that all the details always get brushed away, we assume we have great patent clerks making sure only "novel inventions" get awarded patents. It assumes that patent clerks are even capable of understanding the patent in question (they're not, the vast majority are new grads [2]). We assume the copyright office is property staffed (it isn't [3]) We assume the intricacies of abstract items like "APIs" can be property understood by both judge and jury in order to reach the right verdict in the theoretically obvious cases (also turns out that most people are not familiar with these concepts).
How could this not be expensive? You essentially need to create "property lore" in every case that is tried. Any wish for the system to be faster would necessarily also mean less correct verdicts. There's no magic "intellectual property dude" that could resolve all this stuff. Copyright law says that math can't be copyrighted, yet we can copyright code. Patent law says life can't be patented, yet our system plainly allows copyrighting bacteria. Why? Because a lawyer held of a tube of clear liquid and said "does this seem like life to you?" The landmark Supreme Court case was decided 5-4 [4], and all of a sudden a thing that should obviously not be copyrightable by anyone that understands the science was decided it was. There's no "hidden true rules" that if just followed, would make this system efficient. It is, by design, a system that makes things up as it goes along.
As mentioned in other comments, at best you could just flip burden to the other party, which doesn't make the system less expensive, it just shifts the default party that has to initially burden the cost. Arguably this is basically what we have with patents. Patents are incredibly "inventor friendly". You can get your perpetual motion machine patented easy-peasy. In fact, there is so much "respect" for "ideas" as "real things", that you can patent things you never made and have no intention of making. You can then sue companies that actually make the thing you "described first". Every case is a new baby being presented to King Solomon to cut in half.
In other words, an inexpensive system would at minimum require universal understanding and agreement on supremely intricate technical details of every field it aims to serve, which isn't just implausible, it is arguably impossible by definition since the whole point of intellectual property is to cover the newest developments in the field.
1. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canada-can-fight-us-tari...
2. https://tolmasky.com/2012/08/29/patents-and-juries/
3. https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-chaos-doge/
You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)
When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.
I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
It was a very small start, it only protected nobles from the king, but it's generally considered to be the start.
In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).
In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.
In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.
And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incar...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-...
https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/the-withering-of-public...
https://www.idea.int/blog/how-independent-us-supreme-court-u...
Corporate law is a thing. There are huge, consequential lawsuits between giant corporations.
Yeah and nevermind everything else. Thanks for the laugh.
You can see the effects in how people love simplifying things into the left/right spectrum, sometimes adding a second axis for conservative/liberal. Because if you do PCA, those are probably the most important factors for many people.
But they fail to generalize this realization to openly discuss the other "less critical" dimensions.
It's a failure of the education system and it perpetuates learned helplessness.
How could I guess you are not black?
How do you think the wealthy resolve dusputes among themselves? You obviously have never lived in a truly lawless society
It's amazing that after so many failures people are still preaching communism.
You'd have a leg to stand on if you could produce a single communist society which worked for the working class instead of the communist elites.
If the laws protect the wealthy then perhaps your cynical view misses the fact that there is more wealth held by the average US citizen than that of any other nation on earth. Are we trending the correct direction? No. But that’s not the result of injustice, it’s the result of an economic system that prioritizes wealth extraction.
Wealth and power aren’t entirely the same.
I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run.
Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations.
The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.
I actually have a Bambu Labs at home for occasional use but I would not consider anything but Prusas for a general-use desktop FDM printer in basically any more serious setting. This has been the situation for many years now (over the last 12 years or so, I've had to make a few purchase decisions for batches of 5-15 FDM printers as well as different single specialty ones).
And yes, I have had to fix both brands. The repairability of the Prusa is largely a myth, you still need to order replacement parts from Prusa, just as with other brands.
I wish Prusa would catch up with their R&D.
That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 60$ to 300$ depending on the printer... Bambu has warehouses on US soil where they maintain stock of frequently purchased items and their printers/parts can be at my door in a matter of days with shipping ranging from 20$ to 100$ for their largest printer. It seems small but when you run a business that is reliant on 3d printers - these things matter. I think Prusa just honestly needs to focus on their distribution chain.
Like I really have considered Prusa printers for my business many times, but they either have had crazy lead times/shipping times or the prices out the door just don't make sense.
Instead they pointed me at some webpage with a lead time table? Pretty sure the table also changed/slipped over the eight days I waited for them to get their act together.
If someone from Prusa is reading this: I don’t want to hear about your internal manufacturing lead times. Especially if they’re going to slip. Commit to a ship date you know you can meet and deliver.
When I found out that Prusa had absolutely no clue what the ship date would be, I cancelled my order and went with Bambu.
The American market only wants to buy cheap crap so that is what is made and sent. Usually though the skills involved in making something cut-rate are just as applicable to making something top notch.
American manufacturing skills have atrophied as it has moved to a service economy while as you say the Chinese have been boosting manufacturing for 30 years.
"Chinese" in my ape brain is Harbor Freight junk, or cheap houseware from Amazon with names like "KRLFOCGY".
See something like Roomba vs. Xiaomi/Roborock/Deebot/Ecovacs/etc.
This is a real example how western IP stagnates western economy and it's making it not competitive - the IP law makes it easy for incumbents to kill of iteration and competition.
On the other hand, China has major brands in many markets. DJI drones, Anker chargers and cords, Lenovo computers, Polestar cars. TCL TVs and Haier appliances (which I believe also owns the GE consumer brand) are also very common. Roborock vacuums seem to be considered a better value than Roomba now.
It's an interesting counterpoint to the old cliche about paying for brands. Clearly buying on price alone is foolish, as is not considering the reputation of the maker of a product.
At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?
Why did I buy a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress? It looks like all western brands decided to keep using NiMH batteries on their designs, and I really don't like my trimmers dying in the middle of a cut and me, now with a half-shaved beard, having to wait 12 hours for it to recharge. Xiaomi did something very revolutionary: used a Li-Ion battery.
Some brands of cheap tools are getting really fucking good. There's still a lot of garbage out there though.
Creality software is awful, you get no firmware updates for a year and then you get 4 on same day, like do they even test before release? Slicer is also buggy and default settings seem to be max everything, so its loud and fast and has print quality issues.
When I was building the prusa kit, I kept thinking that this is how you should make a product, the machine feels well thought out and documentation is great. Of course prusa is 3x the cost of ender.
My bambu was FAR cheaper than a comparable prusa, and I took it out of the box, put filament in it, and it started producing effectively perfect prints immediately.
I've done multiple prints on the K1 Max where I started it, went to bed, and it was there, finished for me in the morning.
Since I'm familiar with the process, I just jumped straight to using OrcaSlicer and never touched creality's software. It definitely feels like Chinese hardware is progressing much quicker than their software.
I need an enclosed design and wanted to go coreXY, and Prusa's offering in that category was out of my budget, but they seem like a fabulous company.
I remember the original Dawn of the Dead poking fun at it when they raid the gun store in the mall:
Peter: Ain't it a crime.
Stephen: What?
Peter: The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.
Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That's the current reality of hardware in the western world. About 5 or 6 years ago I developed a product that cost me $75 in parts per unit (probably $60 if I could get to scale). The Chinese counterparts competing in the same category cost $70. I needed to sell at $200 to make a profit.
People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.
The reality is that you will also have to bring back less worker protection to make this competitive. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you have invest in R&D, China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? I am pretty sure they are working their damnest to copy semiconductor manufacturing and if they can fully scale that up I can safely say the West is screwed technologically.
Retail customers sometimes buy something not based on price and quality alone, but due to fashion and other such considerations. This works, but only when people have enough discretionary income to spend on such self-expression. Quite many people can't afford the luxury.
Tariffs?
That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.
Apple post 2011 has never open sourced their UI toolkits, Google has never open sourced their search engine, etc.
How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner.
Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.
The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets."
Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"
I got my bambu a1 for ~300 euros during the latest sales, I'm still kind of shocked at how good it is for the price. I can't remember the last time I was that impressed by a piece of hardware
What problem do you think needs fixing?
Note that this has been the reality of countries in the Third World who aligned themselves with the US, a foreign power whose interests were misaligned with theirs.
The US is now having a taste of their own medicine.
It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war.
The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
Those nations that were close allies of the US before 2025 are watching American society "rug pull" itself straight to hell right now with little to no effort at all from China.
I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously.
The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete.
Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?
The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.
I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.
My Raise3D printer is high quality and reliable. It's a nice piece of hardware. The PCBs I order from JLC are high-quality, built-to-specs, and whenever there's an error, it's a design fault. They are cheap, and arrive in 10 days.
I don't like the idea of being this dependent on China, but it's where we are. Weaponizing patents a risk? Problem. Placing the knowledge of how to build civilization in a single country? Problem. At least someone is carrying the torch forward, so it could be worse.
To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.
Intellectual property was a horrible flawed idea that the world will continue to pay for dearly for decades after it is finally discarded.
My main takeaway (and one that I attempted to point out often) is that the value of the Reprap project and it's OSHW nature was not to "own a machine"...the true value was the process of building the machine, tuning and evolving. This all began to stagnate in 2014 when the "You are a fool to build your own printer when you can buy one prebuilt" came about. This seemed to be spread by people who either had no idea what they were doing...or were intentionally planting the seed of doubt. We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.
My current printer I built in 2015. It needs very little work but has evolved slightly through the years...mostly in electronics since it is my test platform for the V2 Smoothieboard development. It does not have a lot of the software "magic tricks" but it prints very reliably and solid (even after being toted around to events).
It was once said to me by Logxen "Opensource hardware is engineering on an artist's business model". IMHO...saying it is dead and giving up is the same as quitting doing art you love because someone else paints better/faster/cheaper.
A quote attributed to Limor Fried says it best "I'm going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it".
@josefprusa...since I know you frequent here...don't forget about the impact the projects have on the world. There are bigger things than just money. There was a time you cared about OSHW enough to get it tattooed on your arm.
edit: grammar
"It needs very little work" is very different from "an amateur with no knowledge can use it". You're overwhelmingly more qualified to adjust it and keep it running, you even enjoy that part of the process.
I've come to accept that an overwhelming majority of people are not 3D printER enthusiasts, they're barely even 3D printING enthusiasts. They're artists and minifigure builders and engineers and mechanics, and they care about the printer itself just as much as they care about a random screwdriver. Many don't even want to understand how the thing works, they just want it to work.
With those values, yes, buying one off the shelf that's assembled and tuned and adjusted and tested and can immediately begin making parts with decent reliability is better than building one.
I started with a self-built printer and even got some key parts from members of our local 3D printing community, true RepRap style. I've spent a lot of time upgrading, modifying, tuning, debugging, and trying different controller boards over the years.
I also have a mass-produced printer.
I enjoy both for different reasons. I would never recommend the self-built route to anyone who wasn't looking for a project. The mass-produced printers are so much easier to get to printing rather than spending hours dealing with the printer every time you want to print.
Honestly, getting the mass-produced printer reignited my excitement for actually designing and printing parts. Instead of dealing with the printer, I can forget about the printer and just get straight to my project.
> We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.
This is the FUD I hear out of the 3D printing purists, but it doesn't match the experience of myself and my friends with printers from Bambu and a couple other companies.
I can get spare parts for both printers just as easily. To be honest, I have more faith that I can get something like a replacement heated bed for my Bambu 5 years from now than the custom-shaped heater for self-built which is sourced from a little operation that has to carry dozens of different sizes and variations.
Every time I read one of these posts praising self-built printers and downplaying the mass-produced machines, it comes down to something like this:
> My current printer I built in 2015.
I have a self-built printer from that era that has been upgraded throughout the years. I also have a Bambu. It's hard to explain just how much you're missing if you don't have experience with both.
No one's taking away the community right now, but if the business around it is disappearing, that's also a shame.
Since I posted my “OHW is dead” article, you’ve been asking me about “that patent”. I didn’t want you to miss the forest (thousands of filings since 2020) just because of one tree. But let’s take a look now. In this case: the MMU multiplexer (we open sourced it 9 years ago). Anycubic (another IDG Capital-backed company) used the tactic of filing in China for an easy initial grant: CN 222407171 U > DE 20 2024 100 001 U1 > US 2025/0144881 A1. The playbook: file a Chinese utility model (10-year patent, same protections, lower examination, already granted) claim that priority in Germany (again as a utility model, already granted) file in the US. Cheap to file, but expensive and time-consuming to fight. I already wrote why prior art isn’t a magic wand that solves it immediately in my article ⤵ And there are many more, we just found a new juicy one!
Edit: Emojis stripped from the original, tried to fix it a bit ;-)
How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.
The things that get through the patent office are braindead. Patents are just weaponized legal minefields now. They've totally lost their original intent.
I may have bought an American meter once, but it was a fluke. Never again.
Sovol and Qidi have been cited as counter-examples.
What's your take on this?
Sovol has been flatout copying Prusa part for part for a long time now. Qidi seems to be doing the same with Bambu. Time will tell, but their oss contributions are not at the same level.
It will be "interesting" where this takes us. If the American government decides to just ignore Chinese patents then we could see the Berne convention become a paper tiger (or even more of one than it already is)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Compa...
Profit and loss, ROI, business plan, aren't really factored in. China wants to develop AI? You have some experience and want to start an AI business? Great! Here is a few million go make AI.
This is the system that led to those infamous ghost cities and billion dollar high speed trains to nowhere. China puts the carts before the horse, and hopes at at least a few of them get to the destination. They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
It also means that if you are competing against one of these chosen industries, you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money, whereas you need to make interest payments.
And despite some high speed train stations being underutilized in the off season, the majority of Chinese cities are connected with blazing fast high speed trains that depart every 15 minutes. Even third tier cities have high speed trains and they are amazing. Now, despite using some underhanded tactics to get Siemens and others to hand over their IP initially, the Chinese high speed rail system is the envy of the world, with orders of magnitude greater coverage, track length, and ridership than Japan. At the same time, domestic innovations allow the newer trains to be a more comfortable, faster, and smoother ride than the Shinkansen, TGV, and ICE. I would take that any day over, say, California High Speed Rail dilly-dallying for decades with nothing to show for it.
The Chinese electric car industry is another one of those that are famously subsidized. People love to point out that some shady companies that have large lots of unsold new vehicles sitting there but written off as being sold via some accounting tricks. While that does happen and is deplorable, the fact is that Chinese EVs have basically leapfrogged the rest of the world in quality, capabilities, and innovation. The Xiaomi SU7 is amazing, for example. But don't despair, some Western companies like Tesla are still able to keep up with the pace of innovation.
Also, all this talk of the Chinese government subsidizing this, and subsidizing that being unfair competition, as though China had a magic money tree to fund everything. In contrast, it is sad that the US government, while having vastly greater tax revenue, fails to fund basically any sort of technological development, and instead wastes all of its enormous amounts of money on inefficiencies (e.g. our spending per capita on healthcare being the highest in the world, but most of it is going to bureaucracy, and we languish with poor life expectancy) while being saddled in debt.
Also in the US, private markets primarily fund advancement, not the government. Private markets generally don't burn money like governments.
And like you said, the capacity and capability is there, but the money gets disappeared into some DoD contractor instead. As well as there being thousands of failed projects, ghost towns, and empty neighborhoods across the US. But the propagandized talking point isn't there. Some wealthy anti-planning capitalists obviously made a successful media push about it. Much like other "enemies" of the US, nearly all reporting is loose on facts and biased negative.
So how is this different from the US? It’s VC’s making the choices not the gov - seems little different. Maybe scale?
> They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
The chinese economy seems like proof this is a valid strategy that pays off in aggregate. Yet when gov here attempts any kind of economic development policy it seems largely unpopular.
> you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money
So like the american defense industry then?
One of these is grossly inefficient compared to the other, despite the final outcome looking similar from some angles.
And if the problem is just efficiency, that’s not really a moral failing. It’s just an optimization issue.
I’m not defending the chinese system because i think it’s good - i’m saying it’s not substantially different from the american system. A group of rich oligarchs and a couple semi-randomly selected smart+lucky sociopaths get to pick industries that get flooded with cash based on how much money they think they will make or if they will stroke their ego - not based on if they will be good for the planet or the people on it.
I’d actually prefer a world where anybody who wanted to start a business was given a shot and money to make it happen based on if people want to work on it. Not blessed oligarchs, but the actual people who will build the thing or use the thing.
Not only are US VCs dumping billions in shitty Bluetooth connected dog collars and other kinds of crap, apparently according to you because that's "what the market wants", it's also an incredibly stupid reading of how the Chinese government works.
They target specific industries that are important, according to them, like solar panels, batteries, cars, etc. They then dump billions into a bunch of companies, and see which ones come out alive and on top.
As it stands, it's been pretty accurate for many things, and has made them market leaders on many, many things. But sure, jerk off the VC model, after all YC thinks the market wants... AIs and ERPs. Woo.
A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup.
You have it backwards, the government decides which startups (by industry) will be funded and the individuals get drawn to those industries. There is a private VC market in China, but it's a rounding error compared to state investment.
The AI boom in China is directly from Xi himself setting it as a national priority. That means you will keep getting money to develop AI and AI adjacent tech regardless of how inefficient you are. There are no investors nagging for a return or wanting a path to profit.
This is why there are solar panel factories in China pumping out panels without slowing down, even though the market is saturated and they are losing money on each panel. You don't stop or slow until the leader says to.
no it would not be...where is this definition from?
Two distinct words night be useful to distinguish between planned without any market feedback and heavy industrial policy like we see in China now. In fact the CCP recently voiced their impatience with Cuba refusing to introduce market-oriented reforms.
some words you said can be true of course but its clearly working out for them
they are just as vulnerable as western counterpart has, I can assure you that just media narrative that make it overblown. Yes western can sanction them and hurt them but they also hurt western economy in the process
I don't just mean screws and bearings (though they are too), you might install a board like this [0] which is a Chinese designed board I'd describe as open-ish. You get the firmware and schematics, but not a BOM or board layout. But that doesn't really matter, because nobody is going to make this board themselves anyways, you're going to buy it assembled, from China. There are other boards, but they are more expensive.
The majority of Voron builds use Chinese hotends. There are a lot of custom "for Voron" kits and components being made and sold there. Can you find a PEI-coated spring steel bed that isn't made in China? So while it's definitely more open than a Bambu printer, it's not really any less dependent on China.
I guess it would be technically possible to do a "no China" build, which would be an interesting (but expensive) project.
Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.
I also appreciate those folks that model stuff in FreeCAD and share their models along with the .stl files on Thingiverse or Printables. It is really a good way to discover new ways of using the program.
On the Vorons, everything is just behind an M3 screw or ten.
On the flip side, a Prusa is basically plug in and go whereas the Voron needs a lot of setup and calibration to get good prints out of it. That's all part of the experience, so that if something goes south with print quality down the road, you know where to start looking.
Perhaps the newest Prusa has closed the gap. IDK. Haven't followed the new designs since buying mine. But I have never regretted my purchase.
But first, that is not a technical nor a business problem, that sounds like a political problem. Prusa is literally the leading european name in the 3D-printing industry. Surely they can get an appointment with some government officials, who are concerned about manufacturing capabilities and future technologies - who pull some strings, and then every patent clerk will receive a memo to double check the relevant patents when someone tries to register them.
Second, Chinese patents have a different weight than EU/US patents. As he writes, they are a dime a dozen. Probably not worth caring about, unless they are targeting the Chinese market. And if they are, the best defense would probably to register some patents their themselves.
not true, there's no personal use exemption for patents
a) Smallish hammer: disallow priority based on Chinese patents.
b) Big hammer: if anyone wants to manufacture anything in the US and sell to the US market, give an automatic patent workaround. For example, there could be compulsory licensing, at enforced and genuinely reasonable prices, for all patents, foreign and domestic. If someone wanted to build an SLS printer or an e-ink display here ten years ago, they should have been allowed to while paying a small amount (small enough that the whole enterprise remained profitable) to the respective patent holders. Submarine patents should be completely inapplicable: if I opt to buy compulsory licenses, there should be a limited period for any patent holders to announce themselves, and then the patent holders could fight over the (capped) royalties while I continue to manufacture and sell the product.
c) b, with the system built in a way that works for open source too. I should be able to publish open source things with zero risk regardless of patents. I should be able to sell them and other people should be able to deploy them on their own under terms like (b) that make it economical to do so.
Same for copyrights.
That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".
These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
The Chinese market is notorious for not respecting patents, though, so clearly that isn't working.
This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.
It is pretty clear China has reached that stage.
[1] There is a lot more out there, but this is what I could find offhand: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jid.3844?ms...
At least for and via gamers.
I’m all for rewarding inventors like this for their inventions. I do not think that the reward should include any sort of ability to stifle use and further development of the invention.
The law should make it possible to build, sell, and profit from a better e-ink product at a lower price. The law should make it possible to sell things that use H.265 at a credible price without needing to be involved in the mess of figuring out who owns what patent. If patent holders, practicing or otherwise, want to sue each other, fine, but I don’t think there should be any requirement for the companies building and selling products to be parties to those legal messes at all.
As far as I know, radio in the US actually mostly works this way. To broadcast a copyrighted song, you pay a fee, and that’s it.
It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.
We already have open source:
5DoF 3d printers with slicers
Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters
Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)
Electrochemical synthesis lab
Open source flow batteries
Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)
I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.
Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.
The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.
I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.
As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
I did the thing I knew worked, and ordered from China. Got here in 2 weeks, and was reasonably priced.
And I didn't have to faff around with damned inch measurements. All the American shops demanded inches... Then again, they also never responded.
Trying to make a thing and not sourcing stuff internationally is almost impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
That said, I think Chinese manufacturing has a huge advantage from factories being close to each other. Getting your PCB for prototyping in a few hours instead of 10 days is a huge advantage.
But at a higher level you're right: availability of fabrication services in the U.S. is pretty poor, and most shops are optimized for a few larger orders, not small mix orders like yours.
Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.
Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.
If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.
That Elegoo seems to be supporting open standards: https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/elegoo-launches-aut... was one thing which allowed me to justify placing that order.
Think about this question for a second and you'll realize that it's rooted in consumerism. We always want 'quality and speed', but most of all, convenience and apparent low cost (that 'apparent' part is important). What if the product wasn't cheap or the best you could get? What if the product requires more attention than being just a consumer? Conventional wisdom says that they'd be dead on arrival. But consumerism also comes with consumer exploitation.
There are numerous examples of this today. People yearn for dump large LCD panels (cheaper ones, not the ad panels or large monitors) instead of the sluggish, invasive, ad-ridden, irreparable and annoying smart TVs that we have today. Configurable modular laptops and phones like the Framework and Fairphone are enjoying a comeback today after decades of soldered-on components (even the battery), individually paired modules, glued on casings (instead of the convenient screwed on ones), horrendously costly repairs and depressingly short service life. The (paper) printer market is so rife with exploitation that their CEOs consider their customers as 'investments' that are lossy if they don't buy ink cartridges on subscription! Similar story in the automotive sector. People annoyed by full touch screen control panels, heated seats on subscription, parts that cannot be serviced by anyone else.. I could go on for hours.
It's very tempting to give up the reparable and open hardware in favor of mass produced better performing products on account of the cost, effort and time needed to deal with the former. But as their market dries up, the inevitable enshittification of the latter sets in. In pursuit of the continued satisfaction of the shareholders, it's no longer enough for the producers to take hefty margins on each unit you purchase. They move to squeezing every last penny off of you by seeking rent on products that shouldn't be under subscriptions in the first place. Eventually, you end up spending more than if you were using the dumb devices. And then predictably like clockwork, people start lamenting about the feature creep, loss of serviceability, loss of quality and greed.
It's at this point that dumb devices market open up again. The market is small and products are costlier owing to the low scale of production. But they grow a dedicated customer base and healthy revenues that improve over time. So with this hindsight, how about we stick with the open and reparable hardware? If their market doesn't crash, their costs wont rise either. This long term strategic decision can help consumers protect their rights and their savings. But that never happens. This is one scam that the world falls for again and again and again, no matter how many times it plays out.
It just shows the stark contrast: China is interested in building and being competitive (through unruly means as well as legitimate ones) while the US is a 'lawfare society' prioritizing paperwork and bureaucracy and not moving to help actual physical industries that matter.
We don't need more of our economy relying on lawyers and paper pushers. We need builders and innovators back at the forefront. China gets this.
Blog posts like these might be heralding the beginning of the end for Prusa.
1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins
2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country
In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.
Could you please explain this to me? Let's say, they (Chinese) patent some complex part of my open-hw 3D printer, how this prevents me from importing parts of my 3D printer from other countries? Let's say from China. Company, which originally patent trolled me, must sue me first, no? And they care about patents? Since when?
Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.
* sorry, couldn’t help myself
I think the core issue is one of how expensive / complex the iteration cycle is, with even sophisticated circuit boards being possible to make on a hobbyist budget, but sophisticated 3D printers and other complex machine tools quickly get beyond what a single person's budget / shop can really support the development vs. mass produced closed machines.
Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
I've been asking: "When was the last time a new hardware dev product got >50% market share throughout industry?", and I think the answer is SolidWorks in ~1995 making affordable(ish) 3D CAD software.
This means all hardware dev tools have lagged, not just open source ones.
My take is that we need more non VC funding (gov't / foundation) of the basic science and early R&D, as VCs are forcing these companies to commercialize too quickly, and the tech doesn't get there, as operations is hard enough, let alone with half-baked tech. This happened to my last company Plethora, doing automated CAM + rapid CNC.
I did a podcast series on this:
https://manufacturinghappyhour.com/112-accelerating-the-pace...
They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.
i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.
I don't find that true of any of the companies I mentioned at least. They all were/are going hard on development, but the tech problems were just really hard compared to funding, and they never made any major breakthroughs on capability.
Chinese companies have been great at going from 1 to n in the 3D printing space with a lot of cost, reliability, etc. refinements, but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either (re: comment on ~1995 SolidWorks being the last one).
The fact you would think this is the core of what I mean. Cultures in countries which have active and powerful manufacturing sectors view the increase in reliability the Chinese have achieved in 3D printing to be transformative. In the west we're way too focused on perpetual paradigm shifts, but never invest the effort in exploiting the developed technology to the fullest potential, and so sit around wondering why we are losing wealth generating capacity to the east.
We really have two types of smartphones Android based and iOS Apple. The patents surrounding wireless radio transmission and cellular connectivity esssentially make it impossible for any competition outside of mega corporations.
The cost is so high that likely only Microsoft could attempt (again) such a move or maybe Amazon or Space X.
“ Extensive Patent Portfolio: Motorola has a large number of patents related to cellular technology, with over 1,900 patent families considered essential to 3G, 4G, and 5G standards, according to Lenovo. Strategic Acquisition: Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2011 was largely driven by the desire to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio to defend Android. Licensing Agreements: Motorola has entered into cross-licensing agreements with other companies, such as Sharp, to share their respective wireless communication technologies. Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs): Motorola holds SEPs related to mobile phone signal standards, obligating them to license these patents to competitors on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. Patent Disputes: Motorola has been involved in patent infringement lawsuits, including cases against companies like Hytera and Apple, regarding their cellular technology patents. ”
You can follow the prosecution of the US application here: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/18608960
Problem (?): We can't produce open hardware for things that others have patented. Chinese companies (and maybe others) are patenting lots of things, including things we might have ourselves developed and intended to keep open, so it makes it difficult and/or expensive for us to continue developing.
Is that it?
I use the Prusa's all the time. They just work. Not the fastest, but that's not a problem. When we need fast we use our own brushless servo-driven stationary table beast.
Build a good MK3/4 style 350 x 350 x 350~500 printer and I will likely buy it. Not interested in the other stuff. Don't even care about multi-material. We use 3D printers for design validation and to explore concepts. Don't need the complexity at all. Don't need crazy speed. Just a good solid printer that works reliably and I don't have to think about. This isn't a hobby, it's a tool. I want it on the network and don't need (can't have) external connectivity (ITAR).
It seems like the real problem here is that China is able to identify strategic industries, subsidize them, and see the subsidies result in increased production and lower prices, while Western countries aren't. I'm not sure if Prusa themselves can do anything about it, but unless the West gets its shit together and decides to actually try to compete, it seems like eventually every advanced manufacturing industry will be mainly Chinese.
So perhaps a bad thing for the hardware side, but as a consumer/user I want a smooth experience.
Your comment is ignorant nonsense.
Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.
Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.
His company:
Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.
Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.
They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.
”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?
It’s listed very first on this page: https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_2...
200% tax relief on R&D was news to me (i.e. you get paid to do R&D), and indicative of what's going on.
In a way this is good. 3d printing is neat, but it got too much hype which was taken away from other useful things makers should also have experience in. More makers should think of injection molding when doing plastic parts. Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines (or if you want to have fun shapers and planers - both obsolete but still a lot of fun if time/money isn't important). Wood working has never really lost popularity, but it should be mentioned as a good option for makers. There are also cloth options - sew, knit, spin, tat (my favorite). There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Finally along those lines, for some just drawing something up in CAD and sending it off to someone else to make is a good option. FreeCAD has come a long way finally has reached 1.0, or you can pay for one of the commercial options - some of them are reasonable for makers though read the fine print.
I'd love to, but I'm not getting those into my apartment.
Regular mills and lathes would basically turn the room where it's located into a shop, with chips flying everywhere, so you better have a spare room. Noise might also be a problem. Even moving them is a project by itself. Tall ask for a hobbyist.
Yes but the fewest come at the price and versatility as 3D printing. Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement. Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
You can make everything in your basement, just like you can make a 3d printer in your basement, and for similar prices. Almost nobody does it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
> Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
Skill is developed. You can do woodworking with just a sharp rock you find, no need for any more tools. Most people in woodworking choose to trade money for time and buy a lot of tools, but you can decide how far you want to go.
Time is the real constraint for everything of course. However that is my original point - if your goal isn't building a 3d printer (a fine goal) then trading money for time and buying the tools (which might or might not be a 3d printer) is probably you best bet. Assuming you have money to buy a 3d printer of course, but if you don't than a sharp rock and woodworking is probably your best hobby just because it is what you can afford.
they're cc-by-nc, though, which is not really open source
https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-is-100x-more-expensive...
Now I own a bambulab. They are as cheap as the one from Anycubic, but much more reliable and easier to setup. I honestly don't know how can they make it so cheap, even my a1 mini, cost less than $250, has wifi, a camera for timeplase. Back in the day all you can get is a controller board with monochrome LCD running 8 bit mcu.
The westerner had a big head start, but they became greedy. Ultimaker could be the today Bambulab if they had spent more on RnD, and tried to bring their tech to broader market.
Given the lopsided cost that courts bring to the table, patents only help the big players- since only they canafford to play.
I invented something I ttruly think could change the world. Went to a patent attorney. He said basically - create a patent, wait till someone unsuspectingly builds a product with the same basic idea, and then sue the pans off them. If you try to develop it yourself, the patent will not help - the chinese will copy it and laugh, and the americans will copy it, modify it, and then sue you because they can push more patents than you can defend yourself against. In the best case, they may offer to settle for a small fee if you give them all your IP for free...
I have yet to see anything good from patents, but over the years I have seen just how much they prevent anything new from coming to the world.
This has a disadvantage of no protection for genuine innovation, but who are we kidding? There is none anyway where it matters most (China). So why do we handicap ourselves following these stupid laws while the Chinese just break them and the US... Well in the US whoever has most money for lawyers wins.
For open source/hardware to thrive Ip laws have to be abolished or at least changed a lot.
Edit 2: wait, i misunderstood ‘you cant be serious’? Not sure but what I tried to address was a cult of personality. Thats not something I feel fitting in this whole context.
Clearly stovepiping the generation of IP monopolies and laundering them across borders and through unrelated court systems is a captured perverse incentive structure.
The key word here is "Should", as different places have different cultural values regarding intellectual property. Some see bad faith verbatim cloning as lucrative business opportunities (it rarely is), and creatives as a natural resource to be exploited (unfortunately they often are.)
Notably, a large part of the community quietly financially supports this cloning practice, and rarely follow their lofty ideals when purchasing.
Commercial opportunities are naturally degenerating in a saturated market, and businesses that did innovate their own unique products owe people nothing.
Note, competing with free is a bad business model, and the faster cloners fail the better. Prusa was boosted by the rep-rap project, and has spent decades rehashing the same core designs. It is not a sustainable growth strategy. =3
I don't know Tailwind so perhaps it is not easy to fix.
"This is a story from 3D printing, but all the areas with heavy open hardware development are in Made in China 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 and its successors. Make sure you keep an eye on the filings around your expertise, it is incomparably much easier to do something now than later."
He seems to point pretty directly to Chinese subsidies allowing those printers to be sold under cost. That’s not capitalism.
And the government sat on its hands and our representatives loved all the Prime boxes stacked at their doorstep. It has ensh#ttified entire industries that once depended upon retail as their interface with customers.
The free-market folks talk about something that works in theory as an ideal, but has never actually been put into practice.
But my bet is on clever people figuring out and systematizing things to reduce the current high cost items.
Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.