[awakeasleep]

Prusa is still the most 'open source-ish' choice, but they're no longer a polar opposite to Bambu, in 2023 they started making efforts to stop commercialization of their designs, stopped sharing source/design material for their PCBs, etc.

Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:

“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”

https://blog.prusa3d.com/core-one-cad-files-release-under-th...

Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.

[Aurornis]

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.

[supern0va]

Josef clearly cares about being as open as possible, but has bumped up against the fact that companies like Bambu can just take their designs and extend them with things they don't share, and sell a product with more features and a lower price.

Unfortunately, it seems like the fully open source business model doesn't work well when you can be undercut by extremely cheap labor from another country and a company that doesn't share or reciprocate your values.

It sucks. Also, fuck Bambu.

[21asdffdsa12]

That other country is the company- and it can subsidize the frontend which you call a company with money earned by other monopoly frontends.

Think of china less as a country and more as one huge Chaebol.

[kiba]

Share what? Nothing what Bambu is doing is remotely secret. There are no mystery sauce to figure out. Prusa genuinely got outflanked by Bambu when it comes to designing a printer.

But yes, fuck bambu.

[SchemaLoad]

They forked the slicer, and then put the networking part in a plugin that gets downloaded after you open it purely so they don't have to share the source for it as the rest of the slicer is GPL.

[godzillabrennus]

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...

[numpad0]

They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.

[aleph_minus_one]

> They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers.

There exist a lot of other buying criteria than price.

[RobotToaster]

Their printers are no longer open source hardware, according to the definition endorsed by a certain Josef Pruša https://freedomdefined.org/OSHW#Endorsements

[scottbez1]

It’s rough but I understand it.

You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.

It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).

At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.

I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.

[Arch-TK]

Nothing in Prusa's OCL stops anyone from cloning and selling their printer.

It only stops the honest people from doing that (and possibly much more, like manufacturing and selling replacement parts or mods).

Creating 3D models from existing products is relatively fast and easy. The hard parts have always been the actual design process, materials selection, and setting up the supply and manufacturing chain.

Prusa took what was practically a non-issue (cloning of their modern printers which have multiple custom parts and are overall not easy to clone cheaply anyway) and used it to restrict the freedoms of end users and small businesses while crying about how they are the victims.

I lost a lot of respect for Prusa when they came out with the OCL.

A damn patent would have been both more effective and less restrictive for reasonable commercial purposes.

[imtringued]

Can you explain how releasing model files under a restrictive license vs not releasing model is a net restriction of the freedoms of end users and small businesses? The impression I'm getting is that if they locked away those files and never released them, you would have nothing to complain about.

This is like complaining about Valve letting game developers generate free Steam keys (=Valve doesn't get fees) that can be sold on other storefronts with the caveat that the developer must sell the keys for at least the same price he set on steam. Being allowed to sell those keys is a sign of goodwill, but the goodwill is conditional upon the source of goodwill not destroying itself. If you buy a game on the Humble Store, Valve won't get a single cent, most of the money goes to the developer, and yet Valve still has all of the ongoing infrastructure costs.

[scottbez1]

What you’ve said is true but also misses the point. Licenses have never been about stopping bad actions because a bit of text can’t prevent someone from buying materials and building things, just like a speed limit sign has never stopped someone from speeding (unless they crash into it).

They ARE however deterrents to bad actions from less-than-scrupulous entities, and enforcement mechanisms against fully-unscrupulous entities.

I suspect (but will admit I am just guessing here) that Prusa would prefer not to get to the enforcement stage because it is both costly and annoying, but having that in your back pocket is, sadly, necessary in a litigious society with some number of unscrupulous actors, and the deterrent effect alone is likely enough to achieve most of their goals.

[kiba]

The Chinese are very good at cloning, source code or not. Guess who they're cloning? Bambu.

The market leader gets cloned but somehow the market leader is still standing.

That market leader was previously Prusa. Prusa rested on their laurel and got outflanked.

[Arch-TK]

They really are not deterrents.

Even if the unscrupulous entities cared about the license, they would just get their (already paid for) CAD person to reverse engineer every single necessary model over the course of a week. If an amateur like me can reliably do that in his spare time, imagine what a professional could do during an 8 hour shift.

But it doesn't matter either way because no unscrupulous entity is going to be dumb enough to publicly announce that they used the models to produce their clone.

If I manufacture a clone of a Prusa, there is no way for anyone to prove that I used the original 3D models. If it were possible to prove that, it would also be possible to "prove" that I copied 3D CAD models that I've never seen, which could put me in legal trouble. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and reverse engineering (and all the costs associated with manufacturing and prototyping[0]) likely _can_ reproduce a near identical Prusa printer.

As an aside, if you've seen the average Prusa clone, it's often quite far from the original design. Almost nobody 1:1 cloned Prusas back when that was a thing, because the Prusa design didn't cut corners. Those clones would often use designs which were probably derived from the original, and were unpublished. Why didn't Prusa go after them for this? He should have had just as much luck given that those manufacturers were potentially in breach of the GPL.

In summary, the OCL cannot actually stop clones, because if it did, we'd have some serious problems with our legal systems, prohibiting perfectly legal reverse engineering (irrespective of if the cloners did the reverse engineering or not).

It _only_ stops people who are honest enough to state that their designs are derived from Prusa's models. People who weren't a threat to begin with, and who now are voluntarily subscribing to legal issues if they ever felt like selling a Prusa modification without Prusa's approval.

The real deterrents are:

* Design complexity

* Extreme amounts of competition (almost nobody would buy a prusa clone these days unless they _wanted_ to have an almost broken printer to force them to learn how to make it work reliably). We have cheap, good, first party 3D printer designs.

[0]: To clarify, when I say prototyping, this needs to happen irrespective of if you reverse engineer or not. Once you have the models, which will be true to life, you still have to "reverse engineer" the tools/dies/materials/etc, for which Prusa sensibly does _not_ offer the models.

[greenleafone7]

So you want European companies to keep being nice and "open", do all the research and invent new technologies and products for the chinese to copy and sell cheap clones of!

[kiba]

There's nothing secret in these 3d printers. The Chinese are very capable of reverse engineering these products and out innovating these companies.

[greenleafone7]

It's what the chinese have been saying for decades. More to make themselves feel better than anything else, yet Europe, Japan, or the US are constantly fighting with their infinite spies, and even though they are more than capable to 'outclass' everyone as you say, for whatever reason they never do. Even local Japanese strawberry farms are having issues with chinese spies for decades now (source: widely known, and personal experience).

They don't out-innovate anyone, they copy and use infinite slave labour to flood the market with cheap inferior products. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8xj9jp57r2o

[kiba]

The Chinese can be oppressive, thieves, and innovative.

[mordae]

They could have simply asked EU to introduce protective tariffs. I don't think they even tried, though.

[stavros]

How would that have helped in their other markets?

[imtringued]

Basically every "AWS ate open core company lunch thread" is filled with people arguing that releasing your products under an open source license is immoral because the company didn't foresee that a hosting provider is going to swallow them in 8 years to the point where the project would have to be abandoned. However, the immorality doesn't lie in the death of the project, no. The immorality lies in the continued existence of the project under a slightly more restrictive license.

It's always a headscratcher when you try to eeke out a living and are told that you have to work for a company writing proprietary software to have the right to work on an open source project. Wouldn't it be better if you made your living off the open source project? Apparently not. If the project was proprietary from the start, there would be no complaints.

This hardliner stance basically means there is no continuum between proprietary software and open source software. That lack of continuum will mean that the vast majority of software will always be 100% proprietary.

[TheCoelacanth]

Isn't Voron/Soval more open?

[brovonov]

Voron isn't a company, nor are they after a profit, all designs are 100% opensource. Sovol runs on a profit and uses opensource designs to run their products.

[TheCoelacanth]

I'm aware but I don't see how that changes those devices being the most open 3D printers.

[f1shy]

I understand your point, but to compete against bambu, I think is necessary. I still find is the best option.

[newsclues]

It’s not problematic to restrict people from selling the thing you designed, made and sell without permission.

If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.

[sokoloff]

Then you shouldn’t make an open-source car.

Maybe you should make a source-available car, or a car with select portions of CAD available, or something else that fits your intended business model better than open-source.

[awakeasleep]

Sure, but you're comparing morality to the legal definitions in software licenses.

Different licenses are build around different philosophies, and the common open source definitions allow commercialization as long as the source & modifications you make are freely available to others. Prusa is breaking from that tradition.

[austinthetaco]

then its not open source. That's just shared cad files which mcmaster carr does.

[PunchyHamster]

would probably need some hybrid licensing. Like "if you buy a car you have license to print (or order a print) of up to X parts/years"