Sad to see them go this way, but not unexpected, thanks to the article by Josef Prusa where he complains about open source.
They haven’t been really open source for a long time. The move away from Merlin’s configurations based software and onto custom code that only a full time dev can effectively modify was a major shot against the roots of RepRap and the community around Adrian Bowyer that Joe was a part of and got him started.
Nothing lasts forever, but the move away from open source officially marks the end of me going out of my way to purchase from them or recommend them.
Long live the kit makers and sources like LDO and Voron. The community created the 3d printing hobby, not the companies, not some guy that throws beer parties with llamas in the Czech Republic.
He’s just trying to make money and not get butt fucked by the Chinese on every corner.
Not everyone needs to be an open source die hard, and that doesn’t necessarily take away from the products quality.
I refuse to buy any machine that is closed source. They are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.
Their market share will continue to dwindle if they keep trying to lock everything down.
People that don’t care are getting bambu lab. People that do care are getting creality or building voron
Not everyone needs to be an open source die hard, and that doesn’t necessarily take away from the products quality.
Yes, it’s just a factor among many we all use to make the best decision we can about which product to buy. And yes, it’s also disappointing they used an Open-Source identity to fuel early sales and now turn their back on it more and more.
Man, the early reprap kit market is not at all comparable to what we have today. Prusa has become a prosumer oriented company. I don’t think it was even a word when the company started.
True, you can have a quality closed source product (look at Bamboo or Stratasys), it’s more lamenting than at one point Prusa was THE open source die hard (and that’s earned them a fair bit of goodwill in a community that generally respects that (on account of only existing because of open source culture)).
Needing to make money is completely valid and understandable, which is what makes this less of an outright outrage and more of an “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” kind of situation.
Bamboo is a pretty good company for printers, do not lump them in with the glue drinkers at stratasys. Ive worked st many companys that own products from them, there the HP inkjet subscription nightmares. You gotta buy the speciality filliment from them that come in chartrages with a chip to verify its geninue filliment. You must buy the plastic replacment beds, which are 1 time use and roughly $5-$10 for them. Aswell the history of FFF is stalled by stratasys. They copy righted 3d printing in the late 80’s and actively striked down competitors by sueing them or buying them out. Until early 2000 where there patent started to ware out and the reprap movement took place.
I will never buy a stratasys
Word, Stratotrash sucks butt. I just scraped the prints off that dumbass plate repeatedly. Plastic bed in a $40k printer, what a fuckin joke.
Agreed, it’s nice to see Prusa put up a modern consumer printer, but for the price I didn’t see anything in the announcement that would make it easier to recommend over the bamboo for the “I need it to just work” folks or the SV08/ voron for the folks that like to tinker (and value not living in a walled garden, Sovol’s hot end/ nozzles not withstanding).
Having just built an LDO 2.4 kit a few months ago, I have no regrets. The 350 kit + printed forward parts weren’t that much more expensive than what this is slated to retail at, but I get a comparatively massive build volume, nerd cred, and the open source nature means that I can tweak, mod, or otherwise upgrade to my hearts content, from being able to run whatever hot end/ extruder I damn well please, to custom parts (hell, I’ve already swapped the tool head mount for Vitalii’s metal one- not quite the COTS ethos of the voron design, but about a thousand times easier line up and tension, worth every penny), or more complicated projects like ERCF or Box Turtle.
SV08/ voron for the folks that like to tinker (and value not living in a walled garden, Sovol’s hot end/ nozzles not withstanding).
I would call the SV08 hot end/nozzles proprietary-ish. They still published everything on github, which enabled the community to design a modified heat sink (that I got printed on PCBWay). The updated heat sink allows you to swap in an E3D Revo nozzle. That wouldn’t be possible if it was truly proprietary.
If I remember correctly, they give back money to the voron community and are (as far as I know) fully open source all the way.
