[antirez]

I happen to be in a special situation here. One of my softwares, Redis, has a very permissive license that was used by many vendors to sell it. At the same time, I'm a lot into 3D printing. So I guess this gives me some perspective on both of the sides of the matter, and what I think, TLDR, is: Bambulab effect on the 3D printing ecosystem is going to be very positive. A few considerations:

1. Prusa is blaming the Bambulab OSS situation, but the reality is that they struggle a lot in innovation, recently. I'm a Prusa Mini and MK4 owner, so I'm kinda of a fan of them, but still... They had struggled to move raise the bar, happy enough to innovate very slowly, with their huge delays with the Prusa XL, and exploiting the fact that other companies were just doing terrible copies. Bambulab before anything else saw that from the POV of technology there was too much left on the table.

2. Prusa itself based its work for PrusaSlicer on an existing open source slicer (written by an Italian guy, btw). While they continue to release PrusaSlicer as a free software, as the license requires to do, what they did renaming the software "Prusa Slicer" is a form of ownership appropriation. PrusaSlicer is a great software that can be used with many non-Prusa printers, my point is just that different ethical perspectives may lead to different conclusions. One could argue that Bambulab created their own slicer instead of just contributing to PrusaSlicer because the naming and the setup of the project makes it hard to do so.

3. Bambulab is also being cloned. The fact that their hardware is not open source does not mean people can't copy the design. The general ideas that make Bambulab printers great can't be patented or copyrighted. See the Creality K1... it resembles Bambulab printers a lot.

4. After Bambulab showed the 3D printing community that it was possible to build better printers, the whole 3D printing landscape became immediately much, much better. They raised the bar. Maybe Prusa will struggle and even fail in the next years (that's my prediction: they will fail, but slowly, since the management is too lacking), but the 3D printing world will be overall much better. In just two years, the average 250$ FDM printer jumped from terrible to totally ok, and this is some kind of value that Bambulab provided, regardless of licensing.

5. One thing that is killing Prusa is in some way they don't use OSS software enough! The future is Klipper, but still they continue with their not-invented-here syndrome to develop their Marlin twist.

6. Finally: using open source does not make you ethically required to open source your stuff. Open source licenses have terms: you just need to follow those terms. If you open source stuff, you are great, but failing to do so does not make you terrible. Remember that in the 3D printing ecosystem there isn't any cloud-companies situation like in the SAAS scenario, where there is a monopoly that allows only a few to exploit OSS value.

[smueller1234]

I haven't ever used a 3d printer. But your comment made me realize that if PrusaSlicer is based slic3r, it's actually also using software that I wrote many, many years ago.

That's another side of open source: if you don't rely on it to make a living (though it did help in getting my first job as a developer!), there's that pure joy in seeing your software get picked up and used by others. This little discovery made my day.

[antirez]

Awesome story! Yes, indeed PrusaSlicer is based on Slic3r :)

[kiba]

My perspective is that Bambulab can be a shady company and I have seen behaviors that's concerning such as using bots and uploading designers' prints without permission as well as patents.

Prusa is a standard bearer of the open source 3D printing community and has done a lot of things right and has a lot of goodwill. But they required a competitor to shake things up. Prusa appeared to not be very good at incorporating community contributions, but I haven't really investigated that in-depth, so I may be wrong. In any case, I hope Prusa step up their game in competing and do not fail. They are an example of an open hardware company that shows that Free and open source and commercial activities are not inherently incompatible.

Nonetheless, I bought Bambu Lab's X1C and AMS combo for my business, because I can't really afford to wait on Prusa to deliver their MK4 MMU3 kit. I still purchased two MMU3 kits from them. The irony is that the Bambu Lab printer failed to work out of the box and hadn't worked out a solution thus far, but that's just my individual experience and partly my personal failing.

In the future, I hope my business becomes successful so that I can fund true free software and open source projects so that more of what I used for my business are open source. I don't really want to use a Bambu Lab product any more than I have to. I'll readily jump on open hardware solutions that meet my business requirements.

Bambu Lab may deliver a better product, but at what cost? Always be mindful that these companies are not our friends, especially business that are more transactional. They don't necessary care about the ecosystem at large. If they can get a monopoly, they will.

If you're an open hardware company, be hungry. Don't rest on your laurel. The open source community can only take you so far if you have an inferior product. Not everybody cares about you being open source.

Now, you will hopefully have a lot of community goodwill from being open source. They're your biggest fans and often your biggest customer. If you are open source without being an open source company, you're not really taking advantage of the resources available.

We should fight hard against patents and anything that might threaten democratic 3D printing and manufacturing. Support companies that support the OSS spirit embodied by RepRap. Tell people why this is important.

Let us not forget that the 3D printing business and hobby got started by the expiration of patents and the work of RepRap, the original gangster 3D printer.