I did a PhD on sprays and I am a former patent examiner. I'm pretty skeptical that nozzle patents are a bottleneck here. Maybe other patents are but I don't thi

I did a PhD on sprays and I am a former patent examiner. I'm pretty skeptical that nozzle patents are a bottleneck here. Maybe other patents are but I don't think there's been a lot of innovation in inkjet printer nozzles since then, though I'm not an expert specifically on inkjet printer nozzles. I skimmed both links and didn't see any discussion of nozzle patents specifically and only a bit of discussion of nozzles. Edit: If someone can point to a particular active patent that would actually prevent someone from making an open source inkjet printer and they actually have the money to invalidate the patent, I wouldn't be surprised if I could find prior art to invalidate the patent. The examiners don't get a lot of time so a large fraction of patents are not actually valid.