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Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

josefprusa.com

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Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#61

Post by jononor »

conorbergin wrote: post #44

If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products. 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 ye…

Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money. But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#64

Post by polotics »

alanbernstein wrote: post #5
tomrod wrote: post #3

3d printing isn't dead. The policies and programs that encourage it's adoption with lower cost are. But my bet is on clever people figuring out and systematizing things to reduce the current high cost items.

The claim is about open hardware, not 3d printing in general. And the claimed problem is that the clever cost reduction is Chinese state subsidies.

Prisoner's dilemna world of so clever top-down Chinese strategizing on top of a 996 vs. Tang-ping aka. "lie down flat and get over the beatings" society. Maybe it's time for China to adopt a long term view about where this is all going? They seem to pride themselves on that.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#65

Post by tonyhart7 »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #60

China, being a planned economy at heart, has a "VC" system that is essentially just the government deciding what needs to be developed, and then Chinese banks lending without any practical strings to those developers. 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…

I mean they are 2nd largest GDP economy with "world factory" title

some words you said can be true of course but its clearly working out for them

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#66

Post by MarkusQ »

nicce wrote: post #37
jeffreygoesto wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is. Maybe not the capitalism you like.

Not much different that using ChatGPT/any commercial LLM. They are not really profitable. They want to capture the market.

Private companies spending (and potentially wasting) money investors voluntarily gave them because they think it may lead to a big payoff down the road is capitalism.

Companies doing the "same thing" with government handouts (where the ultimate source of the money had no say in the matter) is not.

It's like the difference between companies that hire workers and those that use slave labor. They may have otherwise identical business models, but the later are operating at an unfair advantage.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#67

Post by a1o »

bluGill wrote: post #10

Fortunately patents are very time limited - and so all those will expire in a decade or so and then you can make whatever.

I am still waiting for video encoders and decoders patents to go away so we could have easy open source implementations that are royalty free, not patent incumbed to be easily available in open source applications that could be also commercial. We don't have any decent easy to go ones since Theora.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#68

Post by sitkack »

josefprusa wrote: post #43

Hi! Josef here! I was just recently sharing a little update on socials, here is a copy: 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 t…

All of Open Source needs a sunlit patent pool, a searchable database of documented inventions AND all of the follow on ideas around them. This could provide a way to force patent examiners to do their jobs and allow the Open Source Community to crowd source invention bombing the proprietary world.

How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#69

Post by brookst »

RobotToaster wrote: post #32
klntsky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would bring down the price of patent spam even more. The problem is the cost of protection relative to the cost of attack, you can't do much.

It would allow anyone to patent spam though, that could be a good thing.

How? Compare to email spam where the cost is zero. Is that in any way better than a world where it takes substantial capital to send email spam?

Lower cost = more patents = more patent trolls = less innovation.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#70

Post by thenthenthen »

MortyWaves wrote: post #62
thenthenthen wrote: post #52

It was dead when I saw Joseph’s face on my Prusa Mini boot screen

You can’t be serious…

Uh yeah? Prusa Mini has his face as boot screen. Cannot find any ref’s online sadly (I sold the printer). Edit 1: speaking from a Prusa perspective I guess..

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.

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