MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China

MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
makerbot.com

I'd recommend Lulzbot and Ultimaker.

The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware.

Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods community adoption.

The price paid for Makerbot was handsome, but as everyone was doing OK already - this was perceived as 'selling out' and the goodwill began evaporating. The question then for Makerbot is: Does the momentum of being first to market trump the anger among the maker community & alpha adopters ?

When I bought Minecraft at alpha, Mojang suggested it would become open - then after making more cash than anyone needs they sold it to Microsoft. I felt a bit betrayed, not because of $20 but because I promoted it and gave it to friends children and now they are tied into Microsoft which was the opposite of my intention.

This problem echoes down the ages: traditionally bands sell out the truefans when they sign with the majors; the closing of the UNIX community when Bell was privatised; the emerging idea that cool hacks, hardware & software shouldn't be shared among friends, exemplified by Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club about BASIC.

This makes new communities wonder if there is a way to prevent this - Stallman invented the GPL to stop the 'tradgedy of the commons' happening to his work & community.

Is there a community GPL that could have been used for MakerBot to ensure it stayed community orientated ?

Does this reflect the difference between Free and Open ? GPL & MIT, is this the tragedy of the commons that only the GPL ensures against ?