| ▲ | Aurornis 5 hours ago | |
I've been a Prusa defender for a long time, including when they added the break-off tab to enable custom firmware which caused a lot of upset. They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past. My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good. | ||
| ▲ | godzillabrennus 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I still remember running Red Hat Linux when it was free and open source, before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, before Fedora, before CentOS, before RockyOS... It's tough to build a business around a product that takes a lot of capital to build, and you offer for free to your competitors... | ||