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.
