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> I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant

> I’m astonished by this opinion. They released their designs under a permissive licence. Should people be mind readers and figure out that they actually meant that you should not make 1:1 clones? Anyone who's been in the 3D Printing community for a while understands the expectation. It used to be that designs and concepts were shared and expanded on. Hotend and nozzle designs were shared. Techniques for assembling hotends. The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles. People parlayed that into ebay stores and a few businesses popped up. Businesses where the seller of the board was also the designer. To folks who were part of that, someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin seems disingenuous. They're not introducing meaningful changes. This person (or people) did this work, and tried to contribute it to the community, and they show up to make a quick buck off their work. We expect everyone to act in good faith, but were limited by the licenses we had to lean on at the time. Clearly though, complying with a license is not a reasonable measure of whether someone is doing something good or bad.

eschaton 4y ago
But that’s not what the license says. The license says that it’s perfectly fine to make 1:1 clones and sell them or even give them away. If the community expectation is otherwise then either pick a different license or disabuse the community members of the idea that everyone will have the same interpretation of the license they do.
- nullc 4y ago
  The license is the limit, the worst you are allow to behave before you are breaking the law. You're not necessarily good actor just because you're within the bounds of the license. It's important that licenses permit broadly rather than trying to set a tight boundary because if you get wrapped up in litigation over the boundary it can result in life destroying expenses. Prudent people should stay well away from the harry edge to avoid unnecessary risk. Whining about behavior you consider anti-social is a perfectly valid mechanism to push for change in the world and compared to tight licenses and litigation much less costly and less likely to cause collateral damage.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    This is fine but what I’ve heard about China is that they operate as a low-trust society where the norm is to get away with as much as possible, even going beyond the legal limits if you don’t think the consequences will matter. So this idea that we have licenses and then on top of that we have social norms falls apart when you have a somewhat insular country with their own more permissive norms. Now I am a huge proponent of open source and I think it’s important to make it work. But I wanted to point out that this idea of additional expectations is going to be difficult to find traction with in China.
    - nullc 4y ago
      It's a fine point, but same parties that will do that will ignore the licenses in any case.
      - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
        Well Prusa was considering a less open but “source available” kind of license, which as you say would do nothing to stop unscrupulous people. Also we did have luck forcing Creality to release their source code once it was found that they violated the GPL.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      Why single out China? How does the average US VC behave? Is it cool when you call it "move fast and break things"?
      - bayesian_horse 4y ago
        You can get away with more in China. On the small scale, things like faking beer (seriously...), scamming people, and on the bigger scale as well.
  - eschaton 4y ago
    > The license is the limit, the worst you are allow to behave before you are breaking the law. You're not necessarily good actor just because you're within the bounds of the license. As long as someone else's derivative work is properly compliant with the license under which the original work was released, the creator of the original work--who chose the license!--has no standing to complain. If they didn't game out this possible outcome that's on them. Trying to insist that random strangers have to conform to the norms of a community of which they're not a part in addition to conforming to their legal obligations is practically delusional.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > pick a different license Which is exactly what Prusa has done. Contractually speaking, you're correct. However, there was also a standard social expectation in the community. The sad part of this whole thing isn't the licensing issue, it's the fact that this is marking the end of the "golden age" of the community.
  - eschaton 4y ago
    Why does "the community" expect everyone to adhere to its social expectations despite the text of the license not requiring that adherence? Not everyone is a part of "the community," some people just want to make or buy decent but inexpensive 3D printers. I'd have not lost respect for Prusa if the statement had been, "Unfortunately, I'm not making enough from this to continue doing it as fully open hardware, sorry." Instead the statement reads as, effectively, "Others are stealing from me, so I can't make more fully open hardware, sorry." And that's wrong--he gave it to them, they didn't steal it!
mdorazio 4y ago
I feel like you’re romanticizing what actually happened. Just look at makerbot, which was a very strong force in the early development of consumer 3D printing. Damn near all their hardware and even their file formats are proprietary.
- sircastor 4y ago
  Makerbot ran into the very problem that Prusa is facing right now. Shortly after the release of the Replicator , there was IIRC a guy out of Utah who was selling essentially a Replicator with new badging on it (FlashForge). They had been open source for a long time, but ended up going proprietary when they were being pushed out of the market by competitors repackaging their work. They also ended up being a bad community member by seeking patents for designs that were already in the community. In my opinion, Prusa is what Makerbot was supposed to be. But it now seems that Prusa is struggling under the same trials that Makerbot faced before it.
  - mitthrowaway2 4y ago
    Bre Pettis of Makerbot even posted a blog post of similar tone back in 2010, titled "Open Source Ethics and Dead End Derivatives", admonishing copycats for using Makerbot's open-source design files without contributing anything back. It used to be at this URL but they've taken it down, and I don't think the wayback machine has a snapshot. https://www.makerbot.com/stories/2010/03/25/open-source-ethics-and-dead-end-derivatives/ https://www.makerbot.com/stories/2010/03/25/open-source-ethi... Not long after that, they went full closed-source (and got bought out by Stratasys for a fortune). I'm sure Josef Prusa remembers that as well. I very much hope this isn't a sign that Prusa will make a similar pivot. I don't expect that it is.
    - sircastor 4y ago
      For anyone who is looking for it, someone _replicated_ it at their site at their own site (though it's not clear if it's the whole thing): https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/obstacles-to-open-source-hardware-3-the-makerbot-derivatives-controversy/2010/04/04 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/obstacles-to-open-source-hard...
yencabulator 4y ago
It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, and not seeing it because "old days were better". > The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles. These all sound like examples of > someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin What's being added sounds like just manufacturing ability, which comes with scale from increased demand. If you don't want that to be possible, please stop saying "open source". Ideally, please stop saying "open" too.
- sircastor 4y ago
  Sorry - I guess I wasn't clear. These group orders or machine shops runs were often done at cost, or sometimes at expense to the person doing it. It was the nature of the hobby at the time. There were undoubtedly folks who would make a small profit off an order like this. To me, the meaningful difference was at the time the folks doing it were part of the community.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    Deciding who is and who isn't part of the community sounds like anti-communal gatekeeping behavior -- and explicitly against the values of open source, no discrimination against persons or groups is a big deal for openness. Imagine someone in the early days had been able to manufacture whole machines from scratch at decent prices. That would have probably been desirable, lots of people would have bought them. You can be bitter about person putting a lot of effort into X not getting (enough) monetary compensation, but this line of thinking is in direct conflict with the communal "open source hardware" thinking.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

eschaton 4y ago

But that’s not what the license says. The license says that it’s perfectly fine to make 1:1 clones and sell them or even give them away. If the community expectation is otherwise then either pick a different license or disabuse the community members of the idea that everyone will have the same interpretation of the license they do.

nullc 4y ago
The license is the limit, the worst you are allow to behave before you are breaking the law. You're not necessarily good actor just because you're within the bounds of the license. It's important that licenses permit broadly rather than trying to set a tight boundary because if you get wrapped up in litigation over the boundary it can result in life destroying expenses. Prudent people should stay well away from the harry edge to avoid unnecessary risk. Whining about behavior you consider anti-social is a perfectly valid mechanism to push for change in the world and compared to tight licenses and litigation much less costly and less likely to cause collateral damage.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  This is fine but what I’ve heard about China is that they operate as a low-trust society where the norm is to get away with as much as possible, even going beyond the legal limits if you don’t think the consequences will matter. So this idea that we have licenses and then on top of that we have social norms falls apart when you have a somewhat insular country with their own more permissive norms. Now I am a huge proponent of open source and I think it’s important to make it work. But I wanted to point out that this idea of additional expectations is going to be difficult to find traction with in China.
  - nullc 4y ago
    It's a fine point, but same parties that will do that will ignore the licenses in any case.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      Well Prusa was considering a less open but “source available” kind of license, which as you say would do nothing to stop unscrupulous people. Also we did have luck forcing Creality to release their source code once it was found that they violated the GPL.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Why single out China? How does the average US VC behave? Is it cool when you call it "move fast and break things"?
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      You can get away with more in China. On the small scale, things like faking beer (seriously...), scamming people, and on the bigger scale as well.
- eschaton 4y ago
  > The license is the limit, the worst you are allow to behave before you are breaking the law. You're not necessarily good actor just because you're within the bounds of the license. As long as someone else's derivative work is properly compliant with the license under which the original work was released, the creator of the original work--who chose the license!--has no standing to complain. If they didn't game out this possible outcome that's on them. Trying to insist that random strangers have to conform to the norms of a community of which they're not a part in addition to conforming to their legal obligations is practically delusional.
JohnFen 4y ago
> pick a different license Which is exactly what Prusa has done. Contractually speaking, you're correct. However, there was also a standard social expectation in the community. The sad part of this whole thing isn't the licensing issue, it's the fact that this is marking the end of the "golden age" of the community.
- eschaton 4y ago
  Why does "the community" expect everyone to adhere to its social expectations despite the text of the license not requiring that adherence? Not everyone is a part of "the community," some people just want to make or buy decent but inexpensive 3D printers. I'd have not lost respect for Prusa if the statement had been, "Unfortunately, I'm not making enough from this to continue doing it as fully open hardware, sorry." Instead the statement reads as, effectively, "Others are stealing from me, so I can't make more fully open hardware, sorry." And that's wrong--he gave it to them, they didn't steal it!

mdorazio 4y ago

I feel like you’re romanticizing what actually happened. Just look at makerbot, which was a very strong force in the early development of consumer 3D printing. Damn near all their hardware and even their file formats are proprietary.

sircastor 4y ago
Makerbot ran into the very problem that Prusa is facing right now. Shortly after the release of the Replicator , there was IIRC a guy out of Utah who was selling essentially a Replicator with new badging on it (FlashForge). They had been open source for a long time, but ended up going proprietary when they were being pushed out of the market by competitors repackaging their work. They also ended up being a bad community member by seeking patents for designs that were already in the community. In my opinion, Prusa is what Makerbot was supposed to be. But it now seems that Prusa is struggling under the same trials that Makerbot faced before it.
- mitthrowaway2 4y ago
  Bre Pettis of Makerbot even posted a blog post of similar tone back in 2010, titled "Open Source Ethics and Dead End Derivatives", admonishing copycats for using Makerbot's open-source design files without contributing anything back. It used to be at this URL but they've taken it down, and I don't think the wayback machine has a snapshot. https://www.makerbot.com/stories/2010/03/25/open-source-ethics-and-dead-end-derivatives/ https://www.makerbot.com/stories/2010/03/25/open-source-ethi... Not long after that, they went full closed-source (and got bought out by Stratasys for a fortune). I'm sure Josef Prusa remembers that as well. I very much hope this isn't a sign that Prusa will make a similar pivot. I don't expect that it is.
  - sircastor 4y ago
    For anyone who is looking for it, someone _replicated_ it at their site at their own site (though it's not clear if it's the whole thing): https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/obstacles-to-open-source-hardware-3-the-makerbot-derivatives-controversy/2010/04/04 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/obstacles-to-open-source-hard...

yencabulator 4y ago

It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, and not seeing it because "old days were better". > The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles. These all sound like examples of > someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin What's being added sounds like just manufacturing ability, which comes with scale from increased demand. If you don't want that to be possible, please stop saying "open source". Ideally, please stop saying "open" too.

sircastor 4y ago
Sorry - I guess I wasn't clear. These group orders or machine shops runs were often done at cost, or sometimes at expense to the person doing it. It was the nature of the hobby at the time. There were undoubtedly folks who would make a small profit off an order like this. To me, the meaningful difference was at the time the folks doing it were part of the community.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  Deciding who is and who isn't part of the community sounds like anti-communal gatekeeping behavior -- and explicitly against the values of open source, no discrimination against persons or groups is a big deal for openness. Imagine someone in the early days had been able to manufacture whole machines from scratch at decent prices. That would have probably been desirable, lots of people would have bought them. You can be bitter about person putting a lot of effort into X not getting (enough) monetary compensation, but this line of thinking is in direct conflict with the communal "open source hardware" thinking.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]