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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?

#291

Post by Someone »

coldtea wrote: post #232
Pet_Ant wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal, That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking ris…

> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. It should. > Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. So be it. > The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art. Sounds amazing. We don't need to go with the default vanilla options that are passed as inevitable...

>> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.

> It should.

Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income.

Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.

Why shouldn’t a band be permitted to do something similar, getting money now in exchange for future income and, at the same time, transferring the risk of their future product being a flop to a third party?

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#292

Post by alnwlsn »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #188
alnwlsn wrote: post #117

Not IP related, but I built a Voron printer a while ago, which is sort of the last word in DIY printers. It's not so much a printer as a parts list and set of instructions, but something that's not lost on me is that most of the core components are Chinese parts. I don't just mean screws and bearings (though they are too), you might install a board like this [0] which is a Chinese designed board I'd describe as open-…

I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having. Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is…

I agree, we have Bambus at work, and they are an outright pain to fix compared to my Voron. And things do break. On our new H2D, we had some filment get jammed in the extruder. Fixing it basically entails taking the entire front of the toolhead apart, dealing with fragile custom-pcb ribbon cables, and trying to not get the grease from the greasy parts on the other parts.

On the Vorons, everything is just behind an M3 screw or ten.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#293

Post by naasking »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #111
naasking wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how that could be considered a planned economy, you're describing individuals creating startups of their own free choice and the government backing them with no strings. Individual choices are driving economic progress. A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup.

Money (subsidies) and laws are exactly how economies are planned. When you've got scale like China, USA, EU, you can throw money at things you want to exist and there will be citizens who will just do those things because of the incentive.

I'm not sure "economic incentives" are what most people classify as a "planned economy", unless you want to take the broadest, most expansive possible understanding of that term. All Western nations would have planned economies under such a definition given the existence of tax incentives and such.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#294

Post by jandrese »

thayne wrote: post #264
dec0dedab0de wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think relying on trade secrets for many things would actually be an improvement over what we have now. You could still keep your recipe secret, but someone else could come up with something similar with no risk.

Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.

You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#295

Post by Ccecil »

I started in Reprap in 2011...frequently spoke with Prusa and many, many others in IRC. Watched the development and commercialization of the whole project through the years.

My main takeaway (and one that I attempted to point out often) is that the value of the Reprap project and it's OSHW nature was not to "own a machine"...the true value was the process of building the machine, tuning and evolving. This all began to stagnate in 2014 when the "You are a fool to build your own printer when you can buy one prebuilt" came about. This seemed to be spread by people who either had no idea what they were doing...or were intentionally planting the seed of doubt. We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.

My current printer I built in 2015. It needs very little work but has evolved slightly through the years...mostly in electronics since it is my test platform for the V2 Smoothieboard development. It does not have a lot of the software "magic tricks" but it prints very reliably and solid (even after being toted around to events).

It was once said to me by Logxen "Opensource hardware is engineering on an artist's business model". IMHO...saying it is dead and giving up is the same as quitting doing art you love because someone else paints better/faster/cheaper.

A quote attributed to Limor Fried says it best "I'm going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it".

@josefprusa...since I know you frequent here...don't forget about the impact the projects have on the world. There are bigger things than just money. There was a time you cared about OSHW enough to get it tattooed on your arm.

edit: grammar

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#296

Post by kristofferR »

izacus wrote: post #146
AlexandrB wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room. All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply…

The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law. This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is suc…

Yeah, people complain about AI companies "stealing" IP, but it's becoming accepted, both by judges and the US president [1].

I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#297

Post by keeda »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #256
lettergram wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a company in this space... First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent. The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their pa…

> if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds. The Chinese market is notorious for not respecting patents, though, so clearly that isn't working.

I recall reading 10+ years ago that Chinese economists were calling for stronger IP laws in China to accelerate their technical progress. Maybe the government listened.

This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.

It is pretty clear China has reached that stage.

[1] There is a lot more out there, but this is what I could find offhand: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jid.3844?ms...

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#298

Post by skybrian »

kamranjon wrote: post #285
zevon wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prusa makes their products locally, the spare part situation is good, the company runs an open Makerspace in their basement, helps host conferences and has done a lot for Open Hardware in general. They also have offered consistent upgrade paths for old machines for a long time and the repairability in general is good. You can also talk to them. These things matter for purchase decisions. Same logic as per your Knipex…

I get the feeling that it is not actually the tech involved in the printers that distinguishes Bambu from Prusa, I think it's more about the supply chain and the distribution network. If I go to Prusa right now to order a core one printer from the US it tells me this: Estimated lead time 1–2 weeks That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 6…

You could also buy from PrintedSolid, which is a US company that Prusa bought. Looks like they have a free shipping deal, but the lead time is similar for the Core One. Maybe when they catch up with demand, they’ll keep it in stock in the US? I don’t see a lead time for the Mk4.

https://www.printedsolid.com/collections/3d-printers

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#299

Post by kristofferR »

megaloblasto wrote: post #79
Workaccount2 wrote: post #20

As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete, they are faster, cheaper, have better yield, and don't really need to be profitable. Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It…

I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.

> One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.

How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner.

Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#300

Post by immmmmm »

I have a good friend who’s in the “hi end desktop cnc” bizness (with some very cheap models). Asked why he doesn’t do 3D printers (he designed plenty) and he told me the market is SO competitive and products so cheap it’s impossible to compete.

Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.

His company:

https://www.badog.ch/

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