Time to find a 'Made in America' 3d-Printer for my next fabricator
LulzBot might be of interest to you. Best power-user printers on the market IMHO, and made in Indiana.
MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extrusion 3D printers derive from the research of the RepRap project, by Bowyer of Bath University, it is GPL. The MakerBot derives from this GPLed work - the first MakerBot parts were printed by a RepRap. This is a RepRap tradition that a RepRap print the parts for new RepRaps, a ceremonial self replication. So the MakerBot's intellectual property is not wholly their own and in fact is derives from a GPL licensed wo…
They changed the design when they closed things up. As it's not a derived work, there's not a violation.
Thanks for the follow-up, it is interesting to see how/ or not the GPL works in areas other than code.
So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ?
Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing way of doing the nozzle or special hot-plate method to avoid warping ) would this demonstrate a derived work and trigger GPL ?
If this type of thing isn't a GPL trigger then why can't anyone clean room a different design of sintering tech and allow general sinter 3D printing and sales ?
Is this difference because the GPL relies on copyright but 3D sintering is patent protected ? If so does Open Hardware need a GPL patent license, can that even be possible ?
Has a hardware GPL case ever been brought ?
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#63Totally understand being disappointed in MakerBot for a myriad of other reasons. But the whole, "omg stuff is going to be shitty because its Chinese" is a tired old trope. If you know what you are doing and aren't needlessly cutting corners you should be fine. P.S: Not Chinese, I've just enjoyed enough Chinese mfg'd (even Chinese designed) products now to know that trope is old.
I've gotten about half my wardrobe from AliExpress, and I look like a million bucks. The stigma is for the uneducated. Cheap knockoffs will be cheap. But if you know how to spend and where to spend it in China — regardless of industry — you will get amazing quality for the price.
Way off topic, but who sells good menswear on AliExpress?
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#64My crazy conspiracy theory is that Makerbot was acquired by Stratasys as a ploy to buy out the most dangerous and high quality big hobbyist 3D printer brand and then torpedo it with value engineering to allow them to sell their own in house brand (uPrint) better. Maybe that's not true, but the Gen 5 Replicator was Day 0 garbage.
My Replicator Gen 5 was not functional on launch, I never got a good print out of it. The self calibration function was non-functional out of the box after one print, and the inability to manually level was designed out from the Rep2, a design so good, international manufacturers copied it in the form of the Flashforge. The Rep 5 was completely redesigned for no reason, the integral filament reel was intended to bully you into buying Makerbot brand filament on their custom reels, the "new" software made it so you could CHANGE LESS SETTINGS, like you know, temperature, or feed rate. Basically Gen 5 was a corporate ball of dark patterns and poor regressive design, completely overpriced, and shipped before it was ready to boot. One could argue that making the Makerbot brand a more closed design was a choice of positioning, but I feel that is only justified if you can deliver the ease of use value, which Gen 5 didn't.
Sadly, those Brooklynite's jobs might have been doomed when the Stratasys logo first went up on the Makerbot sign.
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#65A lot of people wonder why large companies can't just stay in the US and compete on quality, and here is a great case for why. It doesn't matter how great your workers are, you can't sell a product for $3,000 when others are selling it for $600. Especially when it's a technology still in development. And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home t…
There's a great amount of manufacturing in the US. In fact, the US is the world's second largest manfacturer. The reality is you can't open a manufacturing shop in a hip and gentrified urban neighborhood for "cool points" and expect to keep costs down. You want factories in poorer rural areas, not a place where the media home sale price is close to $700,000. The China or bust mentality serves big business, but the re…
Houston seems to be one place its pretty easy to get setup in.
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#66Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
They changed the design when they closed things up. As it's not a derived work, there's not a violation.
Thanks for the follow-up, it is interesting to see how/ or not the GPL works in areas other than code. So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ? Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing w…
Yep. Clean room reverse engineering also steers clear of copyright, and hardware design cases are very difficult to prove unless it's a direct knockoff -- if copyright worked that way, then things like 3rd party auto parts manufacturing couldn't exist either.
3d sintering is different because as you said, sintering is patented. Physical products have a bunch of rules that are significantly different from software products, and the area is really murky. I don't know of any GPL hardware cases, but would doubt they'd get very far unless you were able to show direct infringement, which is a lot harder.
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It still wouldn't help. It's cheaper to manufacture electronics in China even if the labor costs are the same . The logistics are vastly better over there. If you need PCBs or components, you can have them direct from the factory on the same day. If you have a production problem, you can get a specialist engineer the same day. If you need a new production line with 200 extra staff, you can have it up and running in t…
In other news, the driverless truck is going to automate a few million people jobs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11568699 Perhaps it's worth the effort to have some manufacturing and expertise in the US?
The US manufacturing sector is huge, however it's concentrated in high value industrial goods that are generally invisible to the consumer.
So what you're proposing, yeah pretty much doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#69A lot of people wonder why large companies can't just stay in the US and compete on quality, and here is a great case for why. It doesn't matter how great your workers are, you can't sell a product for $3,000 when others are selling it for $600. Especially when it's a technology still in development. And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home t…
Well said!
Re: MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
#70A lot of people wonder why large companies can't just stay in the US and compete on quality, and here is a great case for why. It doesn't matter how great your workers are, you can't sell a product for $3,000 when others are selling it for $600. Especially when it's a technology still in development. And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home t…
I often wonder if costs could be lowered for many of these companies if they would stop locating in some of the country's most expensive places to operate and for their employees to live. I know the arguments about workforce availability and all that, but I've never seen a proper look into it.
Probably. But then there is shipping. If I may stray a bit. The price to ship a small package from Adafruit to a place less than 10 miles cost me around $10.00 - 4 days tops. I can make a similar purchase for a Chinese spoofed version and have it in 7 days, free shipping. I don't know how the heck the shipping from China is so cheap. While to ship anything inside the us is frigging expensive...to ship outside the us is worse. And we invented modern day shipping.