131–140 of 157 posts
> This includes activities that are intentionally exploitative such producing 1:1 clones of open hardware with minimal changes I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Would you call it “intentionally exploitative” if I build the linux kernel on my computer? They wi…
I read it as the proverbial "solving social problems with technical solutions" conflict. The problem is reciprocity, and they're trying to find a technical setup (a license) to help solve it. You're right that they may have failed, which is the reason of the change in course.
Nitpick, but: > Arduino literally opened their platform to competitors and flourished. Arduino as a hardware manufacturer has collapsed in relevance in the last 5 years, in part because they were continually undercut by clones and similar/compatible hardware. In their case, it seems intentional, Arduino IDEs openly allow other manufacturers to add support for new boards. I think this was always the ethos of the Ardui…
The Arduino Idea to make device prototyping easier and cheaper flourished. It was a success and clones helped in that.
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 e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, and not seeing it because "old days were better". > The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles. These all sound like examples of > someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin What's being…
Sorry - I guess I wasn't clear. These group orders or machine shops runs were often done at cost, or sometimes at expense to the person doing it. It was the nature of the hobby at the time. There were undoubtedly folks who would make a small profit off an order like this. To me, the meaningful difference was at the time the folks doing it were part of the community.
Imagine someone in the early days had been able to manufacture whole machines from scratch at decent prices. That would have probably been desirable, lots of people would have bought them.
You can be bitter about person putting a lot of effort into X not getting (enough) monetary compensation, but this line of thinking is in direct conflict with the communal "open source hardware" thinking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makerbot ran into the very problem that Prusa is facing right now. Shortly after the release of the Replicator , there was IIRC a guy out of Utah who was selling essentially a Replicator with new badging on it (FlashForge). They had been open source for a long time, but ended up going proprietary when they were being pushed out of the market by competitors repackaging their work. They also ended up being a bad commun…
Bre Pettis of Makerbot even posted a blog post of similar tone back in 2010, titled "Open Source Ethics and Dead End Derivatives", admonishing copycats for using Makerbot's open-source design files without contributing anything back. It used to be at this URL but they've taken it down, and I don't think the wayback machine has a snapshot. https://www.makerbot.com/stories/2010/03/25/open-source-ethi... Not long after…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Anyone who's been in the 3D Printing community for a while understands the expectation. It used to be that designs and concepts were shared and expanded on. Hotend and nozzle designs were shared. Techniques for assembling h…
But that’s not what the license says. The license says that it’s perfectly fine to make 1:1 clones and sell them or even give them away. If the community expectation is otherwise then either pick a different license or disabuse the community members of the idea that everyone will have the same interpretation of the license they do.
Which is exactly what Prusa has done.
Contractually speaking, you're correct. However, there was also a standard social expectation in the community. The sad part of this whole thing isn't the licensing issue, it's the fact that this is marking the end of the "golden age" of the community.
> This includes activities that are intentionally exploitative such producing 1:1 clones of open hardware with minimal changes I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Would you call it “intentionally exploitative” if I build the linux kernel on my computer? They wi…
The clones in many ways are better engineering . Any engineer can build a bridge. Only a good engineer can build a bridge that meets all the user requirements, while not massively overengineering the structure (and hence the budget). They typically cut just the right corners to make a still functional product at a vastly reduced price. And for that, the clone-makers are, IMO, contributing to the ecosystem. The origin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open-source hardware licensing is not as straightforward as software, and funding isn't really figured out yet either. Hardware has significant costs to develop, manufacture, and sell, and many projects are niche or passion projects that can't compete with mass manufactured clones. Legal obligations of the licensing aside, the understanding is that the primary way to support the creator is to buy directly from them.…
There are no Licenses in hardware. There are patents but not licenses. For example you can license the Diagram of a circuit but you can not get a license for the circuit. you can get a patent if it's inovative.
> This includes activities that are intentionally exploitative such producing 1:1 clones of open hardware with minimal changes I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Would you call it “intentionally exploitative” if I build the linux kernel on my computer? They wi…
There is a group of people (customers), for whom hardware being open source matters. That group will buy Prusa printers, because of "openness", and refuse to buy Bambu Lab printers, because they are mostly proprietary. You can either sell to that group and accept the cloning, or not sell to that group by going proprietary and making cloning more difficult.