Brothers. Sisters. I want to apologize. For years you have put your trust in me and for years I
have led you astray. Not by evil intent, but by misguided conviction. And for that, I am sorry.
I believed open source and the free sharing of information would bring upon a new age.
A new age of innovation, creativity and community. And, with a hopeful heart,
I preached its benefits to you and reprimanded those who would twist the spirit of free and
libre development. But I could not succeed. As the years moved on, scroungers started
to appear one by one, and for their uncostly offerings, we welcomed them
into our community with open arms. But the success of the leech is the
downfall of the host. The host’s hard work to share their knowledge benefited
not themselves, it benefited everyone but themselves. And so they will not sustain.
I am sorry for having advocated these foolish practices. As it is not the
hosts’ task to provide for parasites. His task is to protect himself and to sustain himself.
So brothers, sisters, I urge you to follow me into accepting this new reality. Open Source
is the evil one’s way / of guilting those you admire into giving up their hard work.
It will only lead to them clearing the markets in the favor of those who profited from them.
We should not embrace this. Instead, embrace and accept
the hosts’ instinct for survival and self-preservation. Discard your wicked
beliefs. Join me in accepting our new lord and savior. Join me in accepting the patent.
Okay, maybe that intro was a bit melodramatic. But… it’s true. I don’t think open source is
currently looking like it's working out so well, and when you put the core idea of open source
into simpler terms, the entire concept just starts sounding like a scam. Both scamming the companies
who were sharing their work as open source and also scamming people like me into promoting a
scheme that ultimately ended up hurting or even killing the companies that I thought
were making good products. Companies publishing their work simply are at a double disadvantage.
I mean, put it like this, right? Given the option to buy one of two products,
one cheap, one more expensive. Generally they would do the same thing almost equally
well - but with the more expensive option, a good chunk of what you’re paying extra would
actually go towards / subsidizing the cheaper one. Would there be any reason
to get the more expensive one? For you as the customer, I mean.
And I’ll give you a minute to think about that while we check out today’s sponsor,
3DMakerPro and their new Lynx 3D scanner. The Lynx is their most affordable 3D
scanner yet - but I’ve found that it actually works better than some
of the way more expensive scanners I’ve used. The claimed accuracy and resolution are at up
to .1 and .3mm respectively, and it also does huge scans at up to 5m cubed - enough to scan an entire
car. You don’t need to use trackers with the Lynx, and importantly, the trackerless scanning has been
above-average robust in Texture Mode for me, but as always, if you have large, smooth surfaces,
which are a challenge for any 3d scanner, it will make use of any markers or extra detail
you add. The Lynx uses an infrared projector for geometry, which means it’s more robust under more
ambient light situations, bright or dark, but it also has a color camera to pick up textures. Use
it with the turntable or handheld for results that are plenty good enough to directly 3D
print or to use as reference for CAD work. The included software is very simple and handles all
the steps needed to get a good scan result. The Lynx is currently on sale for just $349
and you can check it out at the link in the description below.
Okay, back to open source. Would you actually
add a donation to your purchase that supports the competition?
For the greater market, sure, open source products do great things to improve all the designs and
tools that are available out there, because by sharing their mechanical design and software code,
others can get a head start in developing their own, maybe better products or even just take cues
from what worked and what didn’t, and in the end make a better product / without having to put the
effort into re-developing everything from scratch. But the problem is, this is often a one-way
street. Theoretically, licenses like the GPL require new code that’s built on top of existing
open-source code to be published under the same free license as well, but in practice, this simply
doesn’t work. In the 3D printing space, it seems like every week there’s a new case found out of
a company using open-source tools like the Marlin firmware or Klipper, PrusaSlicer or Cura, or just
parts of them in their own products without complying with the license. If you can even
uncover them, because if they kit-bash their own proprietary software from open source components,
it’s going to be near impossible to even find out there’s something fishy going on. But
even if they properly comply with the license, realistically, there’s not really much benefit
to having another copy of the same working code published or seeing how some sloppy
modifications were done by somebody who barely understands the tools they’re messing with.
Unless there’s meaningful contribution happening, it’s the same drip-feed
situation again where the actual work is only being done by one side, not the other.
There are a couple notable cases where open source does seem to work, inside and outside
the 3D printing community. Probably the most well-know example would be GNU/Linux - a
completely free/libre operating system toolkit that runs on Billions of devices these days,
from smartwatches to supercomputers. GNU/Linux has always been free/libre and because it’s so
robust and flexible, there’s not much of a market to establish competing non-open source solutions.
MacOS and Windows were already well established when the Linux kernel was first released in 1991.
OctoPrint I guess works because it’s such a robust brand name, and with the
plugin ecosystem built around it, there’s not much reason to use basically anything else.
And in the same way, Marlin, Klipper, PrusaSlicer and Cura are platforms that have become so good
that anything proprietary simply is going to be worse than using the real deal.
But that doesn’t mean they are not being taken advantage of. Klipper, Marlin and OctoPrint are
software that depends on sponsors - the more their code and therefore their work gets siphoned away,
the less visibility they end up with, which means less sponsors, and in the end, less viability for
them to maintain their projects. Yes, these are free software projects, but they’ve all
long outgrown the “spend two hours on the weekend on it for fun” sort of stage. Humans gotta eat.
This is a balance on a razor's edge. These projects only work because people
and companies voluntarily support them, or in the case of PrusaSlicer or Cura,
because anyone buying a printer from Prusa or Ultimaker also involuntarily pays for
development of these tools, which then get shared with everyone else.
And what I’ve learned over the years is that only a handful of people buying 3D printers care about
whether what they’re buying supports or exploits the developers whose work they need to run their
machines. And really, I can’t blame anyone for that. After all, what difference is a single
purchasing decision going to make, right? This is something that is a task for people like me,
who have a bit of visibility, to raise awareness they, maybe Creality didn’t
develop the input-shaping firmware of the K1 from, but instead they just used Klipper without
giving anything back to the developers or even acknowledging that they were using it at all.
But on the other hand, it is disheartening to see that even when I called out cases where
manufacturers were mistreating the people whose software and tools they were using,
or on the other hand, I was praising other manufacturers for doing things the right way,
I didn’t notice people caring too much either way. Getting a fantastic deal on a brand new shiny 3D
printer seems to more than make up for supporting a system that is anything but sustainable.
And on the same token, there are still plenty of more visible folks than me who won’t even
make these considerations when recommending a printer. Though shoutout to those who do.
I wish I could see open source as something that works and is going
to keep on working. It did already work marvelously in the early days of RepRap
and because everyone was sharing everything, we saw such rapid development from scratch,
from nothing. But now that almost all parties involved either have projects that are so big
that they need some sort of funding to even maintain them, like Marlin and Klipper,
or they’re straight-up companies that are directly competing on a cutthroat market,
I just don’t see how giving away your work and your knowledge while charging your customers for
that luxury is something that any company is going to be able to afford much longer.
From the business side of things, it just makes sense to keep what you develop to yourself. First
Makerbot, then Slice Engineering and, to a lesser degree, WhamBam, maybe Ultimaker, they took the
biggest shitstorm for patenting their products, but guess what, a couple years later, people have
become used to their stuff being proprietary and patented, and when E3D released their locked-down
Revo, I don’t think many people looked twice at how far they had strayed from the original RepRap
ideas. In fact, I would even say that patents have worked out really well for E3D. My last
video was about the Revo Highflow nozzle, which uses licensed technology from Bondtech / 3DSolex,
and the fact Bondtech would never be allowed to produce their own highflow CHT nozzle for
the locked-down Revo platform, I’m pretty certain that put E3D in a much more advantageous position
for negotiating that licensing deal. You know, either give us terms that we like, or kiss the
idea goodbye of getting your signature tech onto our new, hot platform that we’re pushing so hard.
Hey, and they even got the notorious parts cloner Biqu to pull a 180 and now use genuine E3D Revo
parts. If that’s not a huge win for them because of their patents, then I don’t know what is.
And again, I can’t blame companies for doing this. They’re a business. The primary goal of
any business, by law, is to create value for shareholders. And that’s what they’re doing.
I don’t like this new reality, but I can absolutely understand Slice, WhamBam, E3D,
Bambulabs, Ultimaker, 3DSolex, heck, Makerbot patenting the crap out of their products,
and making it very clear that they will viciously enforce them. Unfortunately,
it just seems like that is what you need to do these days to stay ahead.
On the other hand, I don’t see how the current market is going to be sustainable
for the open-source projects that we have, like the firmwares that everyone is using, or even
for companies that put significant effort into the tools that they then make open source. Yes,
like Prusa. I don’t know how much longer they will be able to sustain their path of sharing
their stuff as open source, and whether they will be able to make that call in time. Aleph Objects,
who were super committed to sharing everything, already had to sell their business to a venture
capital firm in 2019. The printer business still exists, but the original company does not anymore.
I’m afraid that the golden days of sharing and collaboration in 3D printing might just
be over. Yes, specifically the *expiration* of that one core patent on FDM 3D printing
is what allowed the DIY 3D printing scene to flourish in the first place, and along with it,
everything that is tangential to the entire “digital fabrication” theme, but it might just
be that we’ll need to go full circle on this. So let’s embrace our new lord and savior.
Okay, so going into writing this script, I thought this would be much more of a “devil’s advocate”
sort of thing, but honestly, this is more of a real issue than what you can joke about. But
I want to hear from you: Do you care about your products supporting open source? Do you
care about them respecting the licenses of the software they use? And is it something
that you will factor into your purchasing decisions? Let me know in the comments below.
As always, thank you for watching, keep on making, and I will see you in the next one.