A Reply to Josef Průša

That's fine for serious business endeavours, but absolutely kills one-man-band experimentation at the margin, which is the only interesting bit in the first place.

I think the point is that a bunch of companies make or made good printers, and Prusa stands out because of their community.

There is a conflation of ideas here. Arduino was not created to stand for Italian manufactoring or fair wages.

> 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)

I can see why Prusa is annoyed that people clone his designs and then sell them for cheaper. The end result is not truly the value that his company provides; it's all the careful tweaking of the firmware to make it work perfectly every time that probably accounts for 80% of their engineering cost, and it hurts when someone takes that from you. (Compare the out of the box experience between an i3 and an Ender 3, for example. Absolutely nothing stopping Creality from making it perfect like Prusa, but I bet most Ender 3 users don't get a decent print until they self-tweak settings that should be correct from the factory.)

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.

> 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.