| 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. |