A Reply to Josef Průša

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.

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.

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.

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.