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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?

#421

Post by rescbr »

ezst wrote: post #370
rescbr wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I've bought a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress and its box and manual are 100% in Chinese. Google Translate took care of it. Why did I buy a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress? It looks like all western brands decided to keep using NiMH batteries on their designs, and I really don't like my trimmers dying in the middle of a cut and me, now with a half-shaved beard, having to wait 12 hours for it to recharg…

Interesting. I never cared about what my Japanese beard trimmer uses as battery, because whenever it dies on me (which is long after prominently lighting a red LED), it works instantly fine connected to the wall to let me finish my cut, and can take however long it wants to recharge after that ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

You see, some Philips MBA decided to pinch 0.0001 pennies and forgo installing a red LED to warn the user the battery is drained, and a diode to allow it to run from the wall.

Happy to give some profit to their competitor.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#422

Post by Workaccount2 »

porphyra wrote: post #266
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…

People love to point out the ghost cities and high speed trains to "nowhere". But, for every ghost city, there are hundreds of thriving actual cities full of people. Shenzhen itself was a planned special economic zone that went from an impoverished fishing village to a thriving megalopolis and the worldwide center of electronics within decades. And despite some high speed train stations being underutilized in the off…

I think you are misunderstanding, China pays for 10 cities and gets 3. No one denies the immense infrastructure they have. People deny that they did it practically, which they did not. If the US wanted to match Chinas debt level (national and provincial), they could burn $30 trillion for $10 trillion of eye popping functionality too.

Also in the US, private markets primarily fund advancement, not the government. Private markets generally don't burn money like governments.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#423

Post by Xelbair »

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…

If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players...

They need a drastic reform.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#424

Post by Xelbair »

nerdsniper wrote: post #409
nine_k wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid. This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a…

The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation. Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In a…

Just deny the same patents and put a exponential fee for resubmitting if found to be the same patents.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#425

Post by Xelbair »

AlienRobot wrote: post #377
nine_k wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid. This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a…

Why not make it so there is a limit to how many patents you can hold? So if you have 10 patents, to register an 11th patent you need to release one of the patents you already have.

Pointless as you could easily diversify by having your family members be official patent holders

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#426

Post by bostik »

nerdsniper wrote: post #409
nine_k wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid. This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a…

The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation. Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In a…

The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)

It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#427

Post by stahtops »

zevon wrote: post #81
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…

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 tried to buy a Prusa. Even after I paid them they couldn’t tell me when the order would ship or be delivered.

Instead they pointed me at some webpage with a lead time table? Pretty sure the table also changed/slipped over the eight days I waited for them to get their act together.

If someone from Prusa is reading this: I don’t want to hear about your internal manufacturing lead times. Especially if they’re going to slip. Commit to a ship date you know you can meet and deliver.

When I found out that Prusa had absolutely no clue what the ship date would be, I cancelled my order and went with Bambu.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#428

Post by mathiaspoint »

simpaticoder wrote: post #11

The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. Open-source and community-led IP contributions are grossly under-protected because of this, and those with capital become unopposed predators. This is a special-case of the more general observation that the justice system is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. The answer is something you very rarely hear: the US (especially) needs…

This is why the FSF is important with software and OSH needs a similar organization.

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#429

Post by kmeisthax »

nine_k wrote: post #241
jandrese wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation. I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by l…

(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid. This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a…

[dead]

Re: Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

#430

Post by alexjplant »

reactordev wrote: post #268
alexjplant wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there. "I hereby inform you under powers entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476, that Mr. Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the Ministry of Information with certain enquiries, the nature of which may b…

Ugh... That's not exactly the "Shangri La" the world knows.

Terry Gilliam knew what he was doing when he wrote "Brazil".
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