The open-source hardware business landscape is no doubt a tough one, but is it actually tougher than for closed-source hardware? That question has been on our minds since the announcement that the latest 3D printer design from former open-source hardware stalwarts Prusa Research seems like it’s not going to come with design files.
Ironically, the new Core One is exactly the printer that enthusiasts have been begging Prusa to make for the last five years or more. Since seeing hacker printers like the Voron and even crazy machines like The 100 whip out prints at incredible speed, the decade-old fundamental design of Prusa’s i3 series looks like a slow and dated, if reliable, workhorse. “Bed slinger” has become a bit of a pejorative for this printer architecture in some parts of the 3DP community. So it’s sweet to see Prusa come out with the printer that everyone wants them to make, only it comes with the bitter pill of their first truly closed-source design.
Is the act of not sharing the design files going to save them? Is it even going to matter? We would argue that it’s entirely irrelevant. We don’t have a Core One in our hands, but we can’t imagine that there is anything super secret going on inside that couldn’t be reverse engineered by any other 3DP company within a week or so. If anything, they’re playing catch up with other similar designs. So why not play to one of their greatest strengths – the engaged crowd of hackers who would most benefit from having the design files?
Of course, Prusa’s decision to not release the design files doesn’t mean that they’re turning their backs on the community. They are also going to offer an upgrade package to turn your current i3 MK4 printer into the new Core One, which is about as hacker-friendly a move as is possible. They still offer kit versions of the printers at a discount, and they continue to support their open-source slicer software.
But this one aspect, the move away from radical openness, still strikes us as bittersweet. We don’t have access to their books, of course, but we can’t imagine that not providing the design files gains them much, and it will certainly damage them a little in the eyes of their most devoted fans. We hope the Core One does well, but we also hope that people don’t draw the wrong lesson from this – that it does well because it went closed source. If we could run the experiment both ways, we’d put our money on it doing even better if they released the design files.
Imagine if the next Bambu flagship announced for beginning of next year is also easy to repair… The difference between both would become the features and the Core One already has less than the X1C (no flow calibration, no camera check of first layer, etc.).
For many hobbyists “closed source” = “closed wallet”. For my hobbies I try FOSS first. Let professionals pay big bucks.
How much more closed is Bambulab than prusa though. The gap continues to close in a negative direction.
Prusa have a pretty solid record of being as hacker friendly as they can be whilst remaining in business.
The community love to jump on stuff like this (or the Raspberry Pi) for not meeting some perfect utopian vision of open-source while ignoring the fact that they are still better than almost all the alternatives by a long way.
Not mentioned in TFA: Along with the Core One release, Prusa announced that they will no longer void your warranty if you unlock the controller board for custom firmware.
Absolutely, I’ve been burned by closed source companies overnight changing their products to subscription models, deprecating and disabling working products because it isn’t financially responsible to maintain them anymore. Closed source is an anti-consumer weapon, it’s used to ensure that you never actually maintain control over your product.
In the case of prusa, Bambu took what they wanted from the open source community and didn’t give back. They are the problem, not prusa.
Unless bambu releases everything I will never buy one of their printers, ever.
Seems like a lot of 3d printer companies started open source and went close and very expensive later on….
any little bit of copy friction helps because clone manufacturers are lazy. I agree with Prusa on this.
Funny given Prusa’s “new” design is basically a copy of bambulabs x series.
not sure why that is “funny” when that is how business functions (I do not condone violating intellectual property protections unless they are reasonable improper), e.g., Android and iPhone are close enough “copies” and they each have enough patents for detente.
One of my previous products was copied by several Chinese manufacturers. We did not open source the software and that is what kept our product lead for 10 years.
I condone violating intellectual property protections under all circumstances, because “intellectual property” is not real.
Declaring “intellectual property” in terms of patents entails publicly disclosing what the property is and receiving protection for a limited time. Everyone knows exactly what you’re doing, but they’re not able to sell copies for a limited time, legally.
The alternative is keeping the information a business secret, so nobody knows what you’re doing, even after you’ve stopped selling the thing because there’s no incentive to release the information to your competitors.
The downside of open source is exactly that: you’re not hiding anything, so your overseas competitor can simply copy your work and sell the same thing for pennies on the dollar using de-facto slave labor, because their government is subsidizing the fact and hell-bent on destroying your economy in general.
@Dude
I’d argue that reverse engineering has so significantly outpaced forward engineering that trade secrets are currently impossible to maintain, and anyone selling a product is implicitly giving away their production methods. Therefore, there is no competitive advantage to having trade secrets at all; in a world without patents, companies would just have to out-compete their own imitators if they want to make money at all.
Patents reduce competition, and reduce the quality of goods, for the benefit of big businesses who can afford the lawyers to maintain them. I personally have benefited greatly from the existence of Chinese clones of expensive tools, and I hope their disregard for western ideas of intellectual property continues in the future.
By that argument the Bambu stuff is all ‘basically a copy of..’ as the community have been building similar concepts to all their stuff for seemingly eons, played with many of the QOL features etc.
When in reality the level of difference between these devices is actually pretty significant in how they are built and with all the effort put into user experience in various places – there is serious R&D costs to making them so smooth to use even though the concept is very comparable. As they are not just clones of each other or any of the communities various projects they rather resemble.
Seems like the Bamboo stuff is exceptionally noob friendly but will have a much higher total cost of ownership than the Prusa in how spare parts will work out. And the Prusa still looks to be very open to user customisations for their own personal needs and experiments.
NB I haven’t had hands on with either companies machines, so there might be more copied homework than it seems. But
As asked in the last article: what clones?
There are none. Prusa is playing catchup.
its funny… theres no clones when they dont get the bill of materials and manufacturing data… I wonder why that is?
Joseph Prusa pulled a Bre Pettis. lol.
I think it’s an unfair comparison in fairness… Makerbot had contempt for opensource hardware from day one IMO, I visited Hack In The Box Amsterdam round 2009. Chuck Pettis was there demonstrating the Makerbot Cupcake to a room of people, most of whom who had never seen one before. Basically claiming to have invented it solo, I stepped up and asked if he’d heard of the Reprap Open source 3D printer (Adrian Boyer was an investor of makerbot) and he straight up said said no, that makerbot was designed and built completely in house. I pointed at the silkscreen on the exposed PCB and asked why it said Reprap on it??? Chuck froze for a second, turned and walked away from his own stand, and literally hid until I was gone.
Pre Pettis waited until his keynote at OSHW conf to deliver his FU speech at the height of his success, while simultaneously firing all his engineers loyal to reprap and going fully closed patent troll for Stratasys – the company that kept 3D printing away from consumers for decades. This would be the equivalent of Jean-Baptiste Kempf doing a keynote at FOSDEM to announce that VLC Player will including mandatory Ads and data collection effective immediately.
Prusa has been OSHW to the core for nearly 2 decades, My first 3D printer was a Mendel Prusa that i modded and frankensteined to death over many, many years. I bought a Bambu A1 mini this year because i need a more of a tool and less of a hobby. Prusa no doubt has seen Bambu take a bite out of his market share with a closed design that takes the best of opensource communities (orcaslicer, klipper) and frankly gives little back. He’s got hundreds (thousands?) of employees to take care of and handing over the design files of non hobbyist machinable components is a world away from Pettis’s open contempt of his OSHW origins.
If Prusa put out a competitor to the A1 mini at a competitive price, people would be all over it on decades of good will alone. this all or nothing PURE OPEN SOURCE mind set is very Stallmannesqe and infighting does nothing to progress OSHW. When people are doing their best for as long as Prusa they deserve a little slack IMO.
They deserve a little slack as long as they remain committed to open source. They get nothing once they turn into a company like all the others.
i have written both open and closed source libraries but i dont make the open stuff closed.
If it’s open it stays open.
All of this being said if everyone rips you off and you dont get paid it’s frustrating and the engineers starve to death.
i have my own closed source code as well but i dont pretend it’s open.
No one is ripping them off though. They are behind the curve and have been for a few years now.
They also only keep things open source that they’re forced by license to keep open source.
People keep saying Prusa are behind the curve, I call BS – they may not be bleeding edge designs but you’d be hard pushed to find anything as solidly reliable for the money.
If you want to tinker with 3D printers then yeah Prusa aren’t doing anything interesting, if you want to print things Prusa look pretty damn good.
They’re basically the Porsche of 3D printing.
Open Source takes us back to where the industrial revolution started from – a world where enthusiasts benefited from a common wellspring of new ideas, and were moved to return their own contributions to that well in a virtuous circle. But inventing quickly became a full-time job, and the only way to get paid for it was to jealously guard your discoveries, or someone richer would exploit them first.
The modern IP regime was a direct response to that problem, entitling creators to the proceeds of their work precisely so they didn’t have to keep it secret. This is what’s frustrating about Open Source fundamentalism, especially when it comes to hardware; it ends up opposing the exact principles it claims to be founded on. Because 90% of the zeal isn’t coming from creators, but from consumers who just don’t want to pay for stuff.
I think a mature version of Open Source would look more like a cooperative movement, where creators patent and copyright the shit out of their work, but assign those rights to a common trust. All creators have equal access to the knowledge, and when money is made from open-source designs, it pays every creator’s wages.
That way a company like Prusa can develop new designs, and publish all the schematics, because if a factory in Asia wants to churn them out, they’ll have to pay for a license.
Yup.
The fundamental economics of needing revenue to eat and live makes Open Source an ideology, maybe a marketing ploy, and less of a viable business model.
Even when the cost of manufacturing and iteration is near zero, as in software, people still need money to eat.
Hardware takes real time to iterate, real money for each iteration, and carries real risk of loss of capital. Open source hardware projects were quickly copied and sold for cheap by factories looking to fill downtime on their machines.
A large chunk of consumers just want cheap and low cost and don’t actually care about open source. E3D hot ends started open source and went closed source because consumers spoke with their money, they didn’t care open source principles they cared about price.
Open source should be considered a hobby and of you commit to open source project it should be for fun . Expect nothing in return and don’t put time in it that you can’t afford to do . Secure your own bag first before the giving away time and money to others.
Because it was never a business model. If your whole business model is “I’ll make open source” then like any other badly planned business, you deserve to fail.
That’s literally the opposite of why the movement started. Open Source is watered down Free Software so we all benefit from big companies using common pieces.
The problem with this logic is that Prusa doesn’t make anything worth copying and this idea that this is how they’re losing money is a bit ridiculous.
Right now more than ever, they are behind the curve, so they’ve got nothing for anyone else to copy.
I can get behind the idea though of not quite a trust because for sure that would end up with leadership issues but a GPL sort of patent license agreement where one agrees to let products that follow the same ideals use their work.
“Prusa doesn’t make anything worth copying”
I can appreciated a hyperbole for argument’s sake, but when you overdo it to this degree, you sabotage any further discussion. It’s just too silly a statement to foster any meaningful debate.
I don’t think OP is slating Prusa here, what is the killer feature Prusa would protect by closing source?
How come their “behind the curve” designs are still some of the most reliable and best quality designs perhaps?
Very seriously I ask, what hardware features has Prusa specifically pioneered of recent that is worth protecting? Hardware specifically is where they have fallen behind.
Outside of the firmware self checks of the Mk3s, I cannot think of any specific feature they have pioneered and even there I believe many of those were tweaked from already existing FOSS projects.
Their printers have been known for being reliable and coming with a lot of care with regards to profiles, but they’ve never been known for being ahead of the curve on features.
Even their latest XL printer is riding on the back of the E3D toolchanger.
In essence, I don’t believe it reasonable to so casually dismiss my prior comment, and believe it deserves consideration.
The trust idea is really interesting.
Yes, because a toy 3D printer has the same value as networking software powering 90% of the Internet. Who then decides on the split of licensing fees? You also removed any incentive to innovate once you make anything, since you can just sit collecting wages.
It’s a pipe dream born out of misunderstanding or trying to repurpose a movement to fit your imagined utopia. Open Source was never supposed to be a business model, stop trying to make it one.
Yes, because a toy 3D printer has the same value as networking software powering 90% of the Internet. Who then decides on the split of licensing fees? You also removed any incentive to innovate once you make anything, since you can just sit collecting wages.
It’s a pipe dream born out of misunderstanding or trying to repurpose a movement to fit your imagined utopia. Open Source was never supposed to be a business model, stop trying to make it one.
I think Open Source hardware is doomed in that the creator loses a lot of money- which is required spending making hardware (as opposed to software). You’re buying PC boards, materials, CNC work, CADD software etc. all for the good of humanity? Never mind the many hours toiled.
There needs to be some way for a creator to at least break even so they can continue making things. When our favorite low cost country copies and mass produces it for profit, is a creator supposed to feel happy and proud about that? No way.
I also see someone will rip off the design by taking source files, making a small change and claiming it to be their own on their blog etc. for fame and glory. Is a creator supposed to feel happy and proud about that? No way.
I think Open Source needs fundamental changes but not sure how to do it. Protecting IP from Asia is costly as well. Good reads here: https://harris-sliwoski.com/chinalawblog
I don’t think it is doomed at all, though it certainly isn’t all sunshine and rainbows either (a most curious idiom).
For me most things probably just have to become a little later in their lifecycle open rather than start there so the original producers can recover the development costs before the cheap clones can flood the market etc. Or be in a niche that will attract the right customers but without large enough potential buyers pool to really make the clones worth setting up.
Though you can also argue more than a few folks on Youtube and the like are making open source hardware/designs profitable for them – folks support them because they like the videos documenting the process etc and that is where their money comes from. Maybe some of them even put those objects into production and make a little that way as well.
How about just making cool stuff for fun and then sharing? You can have a job that puts food on the table and then make stuff in your spare time.
The open source debate always comes down to profitability, and asking “well how are businesses supposed to compete optimally if other people can copy their stuff?” And the answer is they aren’t. The simple fact of open source is sharing your designs with the community is an inherently altruistic thing to do, and it puts you at a disadvantage. We can talk about the benefits that using other open solutions brings, and they certainly exist, but the fundamental fact remains: committing to open sourcing hardware and software as a company is going to make it harder to compete, and you will be copied by companies that don’t care about these principles to your own detriment.
It used to be, though, that the hobbyist community was primarily built by people who appreciated that sacrifice made by anyone willing to share that work and rewarded them with their willingness to pay a premium for products that may be less competitive with peer products either in features or price.
Regardless of if Bambu has genuine innovations and advantages over open competitors (they do) and regardless of if the open machines are more expensive (they are) they used to be able to rely on that core audience that was motivated ideologically rather than financially. I don’t like what Prusa’s done here, but I understand why they’re doing it. That core audience is gone. Nearly every conversation I have about open hardware these days outside a very small cadre of old friends ends with “but it’s more expensive,” or “it doesn’t have [x] while the closed one does.” If it’s not a significant selling point anymore, but is a weakness, abandoning more and more open source ideals is just good business
I just continue to wonder what Prusa’s value proposition is right now.
Sure they have cultists who will claim magic print quality and reliability, but actual print farms with more than anecdotal numbers show that Bambulab machines have just as much if not more uptime and I think everyone can agree they make quality prints.
So is it repairability? Is it worth paying often double the amount just to make something slightly more repairable when the competition is only very slightly harder to repair?
Theyve talked about security, but if anything that’s just pushing tugging on xenophobic talking points to avoid facing that their print stack has fallen behind on feature set.
Is it upgradablity? I can’t imagine so as often the cost of an upgrade is 2 times the cost of a comparable new machine.
I’m left baffled because the only reasons left are theyre 247 help chat, which is good I guess but according to many experiences not quite as good as some would have you believe but then it’s also like, how often do you even need support for a printer on average, and who needs it to be live and 247? Not businesses as they solve this by just having multiple printers anyways. Not home users, because they’re not on such a time crunch, so it ends up being a nice to have rather than a knock it out of the park feature.
Maybe it’s the morality of the company, but then how moral is a company that handles a thermal runaway patch fix without big announcements or any recalls, or releases half baked products without the features promised or misleads customers in promotional content into believing their latest printer will have a heated chamber, or slings tinfoil theories about competitors on social media, or tells users theyre defect caused bad vfa banding is completely expected (mk3s), or forgets about promised feature even years later (prusa mini bed skew compensation) and the list goes 9n and on and on.
Quite frankly, I don’t believe this company is notably more moral than any company as they advertise being manufactured in Europe but the subtext is that Czech wages aren’t exactly double Chinese wages so they rely on intangibles and FUD to sell printers.
I mean I’m really ranting here but frankly it feels like they have just 3 things remaining in their favour and a mountain of things out of their favour.
Ive just talked about the mountain so are the pluses of slightly easier repairability, being made in Europe, and having 247 live chat support worth spending often literally double the amount? I just don’t think so for a large majority of users.
Personally at bare minimum I’m tired of seeing the CEO’s uncivil comments verging on outright lies and tinfoil theories. I’m tired of the misleading marketing. I’m tired of the bad launches where customers have to wait for the S revision.
I think Prusa needs to improve all of those things for me even to begin recommending them again like I could freely in the days when the Mk3s was king. They were slightly straying from open source the but mostly had it and I think that era was the peak of Prusa. Hopefully it isn’t the only peak, and for it to be, I feel they really need to improve these aspects and not rely on lies and nationalism to get ahead.
I realize that was quite long but I just tired of seeing many Prusa loyalists give them break after break for things they would strongly critique any other company about. I’m tired of the no longer deserved halo around the Prusa brand.
Yes, you very much are ranting, in multiple comments below this article. Do you have any interests to divulge?
Repairability doesn’t differ slightly, it differs a lot. Replacing a Bambu part or assembly can take hours, depending on the specific part. These printers aren’t built with serviceability in mind.
Bumbu printers rely on cloud connectivity and are rather dependent on manufacturer software updates. The manufacturer isn’t very forthcoming about what users can count on, and a less dependent version of their printers is much more expensive.
Dismissing worries about security and privacy is disingenuous. It’s a legitimate and significant worry.
I don’t think very many people here will claim Prusa has nothing to improve upon, but if you’re going to try and ‘win’ an argument by doctoring the arguments and reducing the differences to irrelevance, there’s no use in arguing in the first place. Just believe whatever you want and save yourself the trouble.
I don’t appreciate the insinuation of impropriety just because of disagreement.
Anyhow, I will address some of these points.
On the count of repairability, I stand by my comment for this reason: While it is certainly true that some parts take a while to replace, those are the parts you are unlikely to need to replace in any reasonable amount of time. The parts you most likely need to replace such as the belts, hotend, wipers and such are all easy to replace. There is a difference but not as great as I believe you think they are when you consider the likely hood of each part needing to be replaced.
On the count of cloud connectivity, this is a common misconception or perhaps opinion based on old information. As it stands now, numerous of their models have firmware that can be updated offline, all of them can print and monitor over Lan, and all of them can print from microSD cards.
It is certainly true you are dependant on them for firmware updates but they’ve issued garunteed that span around 8 years from the release of each printer for updates.
This to me makes the question of security purely one of whether you trust the company vs another company, as Prusa also has cloud services on the docket.
Lastly, on the claim of doctored arguments, you havent pointed out which you feel are doctored so obviously I cannot respond to that directly.
I don’t appreciate the insinuation of impropriety just because of disagreement.
Anyhow, I will address some of these points.
On the count of repairability, I stand by my comment for this reason: While it is certainly true that some parts take a while to replace, those are the parts you are unlikely to need to replace in any reasonable amount of time. The parts you most likely need to replace such as the belts, hotend, wipers and such are all easy to replace. There is a difference but not as great as I believe you think they are when you consider the likely hood of each part needing to be replaced.
On the count of cloud connectivity, this is a common misconception or perhaps opinion based on old information. As it stands now, numerous of their models have firmware that can be updated offline, all of them can print and monitor over Lan, and all of them can print from microSD cards.
It is certainly true you are dependant on them for firmware updates but they’ve issued garunteed that span around 8 years from the release of each printer for updates.
This to me makes the question of security purely one of whether you trust the company vs another company, as Prusa also has cloud services on the docket.
Lastly, on the claim of doctored arguments, you havent pointed out which you feel are doctored so obviously I cannot respond to that directly.
Bambu are one big investor or takeover away from DRM and going totally closed with their filament ID and cloud stuff, yet everyone here is shitting on Prusa for not giving the cloners everything on a plate.
Why is the community like this?
Prusa grew from hacking, they are a very hacker-friendly company and make good stuff (and make a lot of it in Europe not just drop-shipped from China) and yet the comments section are lining up to dunk on them Vs some purely commercial entity that you might think the community would dislike or at the very least distrust but instead they all fall over and talk about how great Bambu are.
You can’t give Prusa crap for being not-open-enough while sucking on Bambu’s sausage.
Who needs 24/7 support ? Only those who believe the earth is round and it spins in 24 hours and people buying printers live all over the surface of it.
i don’t really agree with the ‘altruistic’ take on open source development. it can be (depending on context) a purely pragmatic and selfish decision. there’s a lot of things to consider. there’s no very simplistic “i gave the source away for free so i lost something and you gained something” market fundamentals analysis that has any validity at all. programming and design are fundamentally different than commodity production. the product is intangible, so you have to consider intangible costs and intangible benefits. once you get so many layered intangibility, things like opportunity cost (what would have happened to my product if i hadn’t opened the source) become very hard to take into account. it really depends on the specific scenario — what resources you have, what community exists, and what you really want to get out of it.
case in point, google managed to use open source android to obtain a near-monopoly on smartphones and to enhance their near monopoly on search and so on. same for their major contributions to open source browsers (both their own webkit, and firefox). open source chromeos is directly attacking microsoft in light laptops, and quite successfully too — imagine if microsoft had been visionary enough to actually benefit from their attempts to leverage open source into market dominance of dot net! (dot net is almost all of the design choices of android, but they started work a decade earlier than google did) open source can be a fiendishly abusive tactic to shape markets.
in the case of prusa, it is a bad picture. they are leaning away from their strengths (open source, being relatively early to market) and into their weaknesses (closed source, playing catch up to superior offerings). it seems like a classic harbinger of doom. successful companies learn early on how to fill the niche they wind up in, and then when that niche disappears they have to make difficult choices. these seem like dead end choices to me. now at best they can compete on price.
personally, i was always an unlikely candidate for a prusa…but if i do shop for a printer, i would definitely not exclude them from my analysis. it’s just hard to imagine what the selling point would be, given their new position within the marketplace
I agree. Quality, support, and community build a business, not just technology.