Some background the author is missing in his post, which I believe is the real reason Prusa is concerned about open source hardware. Up until a year ago, Prusa

Some background the author is missing in his post, which I believe is the real reason Prusa is concerned about open source hardware. Up until a year ago, Prusa was the clear leading 3d printer at their price point, giving them strong sales number at healthy margins. Last year, a Chinese company founded by ex DJI employees (Bambi Lab) has created an innovative printer that matched/surpassed the Prusa lineup and at a very competitive price. Prusa, struggling with delays at his own company, likely saw a significant drop in demand for his aging flagship product (Mk3S+). This, combined with the poor current economic state has likely put an actual existential risk for his company. He is actually referring to that in his post by creating an analogy to the solar market, where he claims that the entire market is Chinese due to “unfair”subsidies. Bambu Lab was clearly building on top of Prusa’s innovations, such as cloning their slicer software. However, they were slow to comply by the GPL license. Prusa also seems to suspect that they have also leveraged other things that are harder to prove like their firmware and/or hardware. Luckily, Prusa has just release two printers that seem very good on paper (the MK4 and XL), which should give them a healthy runway. However, Prusa is definitely at a point where he sees his differentiating feature melt away quickly by a motivated and highly capable competitor, and feels that he is not playing a fair game. In my opinion, the solution is not what the author proposed. Prusa should arm themselves with stronger legal protections that allows them to better encourage reciprocal behavior. Fine idea I had is to have them be more aggressive at patenting their printers, but allow anyone to have a license to these patents as long as the licensee also poor idea their own patent portfolio at the same terms. This might not stop the exact clones, but those were never the real issue, as the author aptly point out. Other solutions such as what Prusa suggests are also reasonable, although I’m not sure how effective they will be. At the end of the day, keeping Prusa completely open could definitely be an existential risk to the Prusa company, which would be an even worse blow to the 3d printing community.