6 ms·

There are too many cheap clones. Too much stealing of the open source work. This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Op

There are too many cheap clones. Too much stealing of the open source work. This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Open Source works until it doesn't. I don't buy Prusa because they are OSH, I buy them because they are great printers. They are an open platform, if not open source. Which is good enough for my needs. If these changes they are making will allow Prusa to keep producing world class devices at reasonable prices, then more power to them. And yes, I know some people hate Prusa or have had major issues. But they do a lot to move 3D printing forward, rising tide lifts all boats and all that jazz. We want all respectable and reputable 3D printer companies to succeed - because then everyone wins.

delichon 2y ago
> keep producing world class devices at reasonable prices At the current price points can you really recommend a Core One over an X1 to someone with a tight budget? Without resorting to arguments about open platforms and the big picture?
- kiba 2y ago
  I took a look at the price. They're almost comparable if X1/AMS combo wasn't (always?) on sale.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Kirby64 2y ago
  The better comparison is a Core One vs a P1S/P1P. You can almost buy two P1 printers for the price of a Core One.
  - bangaladore 2y ago
    Disagree. The better comparison is Core One vs X1E. As frankly the main selling point of the X1E is Active Chamber Heating. With your logic you can also say you can just get 2 P1S printers instead of an X1C, but an X1C is still sells just fine.
    - Kirby64 2y ago
      The Core One doesn’t have chamber heating, it just has chamber exhaust. Not the same thing.
      - bangaladore 2y ago
        Thanks for the correction, it does not have a dedicated chamber heater. But I don't think simplifying it to "chamber exhaust" is correct. It sounds like the real claim is the device can actively keep the chamber at 55C. Other than semantics, I don't understand how this is different from having a dedicated chamber heater. I can close my X1C, but it won't maintain any stable temperature. The bed and nozzle are heating the chamber. This is all assuming the time to get to 55C is reasonable, and that 55C is enough. I personally have a need for 55C chamber often, but never 100C (X1E can only get to 60C). Again, feel free to correct if I'm wrong, but directly from Prusa: "The automatic ventilation system and active temperature control"
        Kirby64 2y ago
        The way they describe the active chamber management in their blog post is basically to say “the enclosure allows it to reach temps as high as 55C, but you can keep it enclosed and drop the temperature so you can print PLA and PETG”. There might be some insulation perhaps, but getting to 55C is not particularly hard on almost any printer. Uninsulated printers with enclosures that are reasonably tight will hit 55C no problem. Add some insulation and you can hit 70C pretty reasonably all without any chamber heating.
- bangaladore 2y ago
  Firstly, neither of these are "budget". I think if you need a budget, you a probably best sticking to a Prusa Mini, Bambu P1s or A1 Mini. Without a doubt. An X1 is 1k USD. This is 1,199 USD. Truly this is a competitor to the X1E though which costs 2.5k (!!!) with basically the only notable addition being the heated chamber (which the Core 1 comes with for free). I have multiple Prusa Mark 3s, a Prusa XL and an X1 carbon, and frankly I only use the Prusa XL nowadays (and sometimes the Mark 3s). Bambu makes a good printer, but it has lots of annoying issues and proprietary annoyances. I also don't like them as a company, but that wouldn't prevent me from buying another if I needed and used it. In my experience Prusa printers "just work" more often than Bambu printers do.
  - Miraste 2y ago
    It's worth noting that the X1 is on sale today. Normally it's $1199 as well.
  - Kirby64 2y ago
    Frankly, the only advantage I see from a spec list for the Core One is a chamber exhaust (not heater, just exhaust). Compared to a P1P it’s missing a camera. Compared to the X1C it’s missing a camera, the LiDAR, and carbon rods. Also, the AMS solution on Bambu printers is much better than the MMU by Prusa.
    - bangaladore 2y ago
      > Compared to a P1P it’s missing a camera. Built in yes, and that's disappointing to see. Unsure why they aren't just including that at this point. Assuming its like the XL, you can use any camera you can find (phone, rpi, esp) and link it to the printer to get a "first party" > Compared to the X1C it’s missing a camera, the LiDAR, and carbon rods. I never use the LiDAR on my X1C. In my opinion is produces worse results then calibrating manually. Agree on the camera. Regarding carbon rods, I would be surprised if it made any tangible difference to 99.99% of people. > Also, the AMS solution on Bambu printers is much better than the MMU by Prusa. Agreed. I never use AMS or MMU. For some its a dealbreaker to not have something as good as AMS. I never print multi material, other than using multiple heads on the XL.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Why would I recommend anyone buy a printer that cannot be repaired? That’s just throwing money away and creating e-waste. Even a Prusa Mk4 makes more sense than the X1 when you consider repairability.
  - gamblor956 2y ago
    Bambu sells replacement parts for their printers. Very little of the printer is not repairable.
    - jonwest 2y ago
      Not only does Bambu sell parts, but there’s a pretty healthy market of third party parts as well. Saying these printers are irreparable is plain false.
  - Kirby64 2y ago
    At some point the value proposition makes sense. People buy non repairable 2D printers all the time. Also, as the other commenter noted, they actually are quite repairable. Bambu offers pretty much every part you could imagine and at prices that are extremely reasonable. Any wear component you’d expect is easy to replace.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > At some point the value proposition makes sense. People buy non repairable 2D printers all the time. Where can I buy a repairable 2D printer? I would prefer this if I could make a choice.
      - Kirby64 2y ago
        Anything commercial that is also the size of a small fridge. You don't actually want one.
  - esskay 2y ago
    Have you looked at the parts shop? You absolutely can repair a Bambu printer, and as someone with a farm of the things can attest that it's no more complex than working on Prusa's. You still need to buy the parts from somewhere. Bambu's own pricing on parts is pretty reasonable in my opinion.
diggan 2y ago
> Too much stealing of the open source work How do you steal Open Source? Can Pruse no longer use it themselves or something? Sounds wrong calling "companies creating products from other projects" stealing when the intention from the beginning is that others can freely use the created project for whatever. > This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Open Source works until it doesn't Isn't those examples that Open Source builds great software? Companies trying to wrestle control of projects after making them Open Source doesn't mean what's already there didn't have a great impact.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > How do you steal Open Source? Can Pruse no longer use it themselves or something? Sounds wrong calling "companies creating products from other projects" stealing when the intention from the beginning is that others can freely use the created project for whatever. Thing is, the fundamentals of Open Source have changed over the last decades - and the assumptions people made Back Then no longer hold. Let me expand a bit: Back in the late 80s and 90s, up until the early '00s a lot of popular open source software was developed by academic institutions or with scientific grants. For them, it didn't matter - the money way paid for anyway and sharing source code fits with the ideals of science. In some projects it's very clear that they have an academic history - my to-go example is OpenStack, the myriads of knobs it has absorbed over the years all come from universities wishing to integrate whatever leftover hardware they had. But ever since academic funding all but dried up, life has gotten difficult. We got a few rockstar projects that manage to survive independently (cURL), godknowshow (OpenSSL), with consulting services (sqlite with their commercial comprehensive test suite, mysql, mariadb, psql), on corporate contributions (Linux kernel, ReactJS/Facebook), on donations (everything in the FOSS graveyard better known as Apache) or, like Prusa, on hardware they sell. The general idea behind many projects is the implicit assumption: if you use a project commercially and the developer has a commercial support platform, be so kind and pay the original developers a bit so they can improve upon the project. The problem is when juggernauts with deep money pits, be it companies with net market values in the trillions of dollar range or companies being under influence of the CCP, come on the field and take the hard work of others to make money without contributing back either financially or with code. Legally, they are absolutely in the clear, if the project isn't under AGPL, CC-NC or other such terms. ElasticSearch got ripped off that way by AWS for example. It's not stealing in a traditional sense, but it is breaking the ethos and expectations.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Open Source works until it doesn't. I would argue that redis and elastic are signs that open source does work, albeit not well as a for-profit business. Open source hardware has a completely different set of problems.
- fragmede 2y ago
  If it doesn't work well for such high profile names, why would we expect it to work at all for an unheard of nobody? Doesn't that mean that kpen source doesn't actually work?
  - diggan 2y ago
    > If it doesn't work well for such high profile names What, exactly, doesn't work well? Almost anybody knows of Redis and ElasticSearch, many of the ideas they implement spread in the ecosystem and everyone can still use the old versions as the FOSS they were made as. If you're talking about that they were unable to build a for-profit on top of giving software away for free without any concrete plans on how to actually make money, yeah, that might not have been sustainable. But that makes it sound like their business plans were what didn't work, the Open Source part seems to have worked out just fine for what the purpose is, to give away software for free.
  - guax 2y ago
    I think it depends a lot of what one see as a success and "make it work". If we think that success is only high earning, growing forever, vc fuelled companies, then no. Open source will never work for that.
kiba 2y ago
Those clones that you speaks of are often of questionable quality. Unless we're talking about creality printers, which were open source(at least with the Ender 3), and are also low quality. But my question is "what's the point?" If you have an open source project and yet the commmunity is largely uninvolved in its development, why do you even care to be open source? Yes, freedom is important, but hardly anybody but developers take advantage of it. The most important aspect of FOSS is that it's a marker of a project/product that won't take advantages of its users with shady business practices, and that's probably the most important thing about it.
Miraste 2y ago
The main issue with this move is that it's not going to cut down on clones very much. Chinese 3D printer companies already clone all kinds of parts from other companies that don't provide design files, including stuff very similar to the now-proprietary extruder. They won't need to spend much effort replicating it. The people who lose out the most are open-source hardware hobbyists.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
Prusa gave everyone permission to make copies of their i3 series machines, make modifications, and distribute modified versions. It’s not theft if you have been given explicit permission to make copies. “You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty.” “You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above.” https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICENSE https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICEN...
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > Prusa gave everyone permission to make copies of their i3 series machines, make modifications, and distribute modified versions. It’s not theft if you have been given explicit permission to make copies. Indeed. But I guess Prusa also expected that people will buy the original such that this support this open-source mission can be sustained. This is where I personally see Prusa's fallacy of thinking.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    Sure, their choice to give it away may not have gone as they hoped, I’m just pushing back against the idea that making copies of a thing the creator explicitly gave permission to copy is “stealing”. The core of open source is that making and distributing modified or unmodified copies is good. Calling it stealing undermines the very important social work we can do with open source.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > The core of open source is that making and distributing modified or unmodified copies is good. The core is not that it is "good", only that it is allowed (i.e. we won't sue you if you do).
  - 2y ago
rajnathani 2y ago
Besides Apple, which other <$2000 electronics/hardware purchase isn’t “open”? As in you can buy parts for repair/upgradability right?
nicman23 2y ago
this is such a bad take. there is a huge subset of the community that made contributions to 3d printing both randoms and other companies. ie bambu pushing the slicers and printers to actually not be dead slow
guax 2y ago
I don't think the cheap clones were ever the problem. Prusa changed gears more heavily when Bambu came, took the code, ideas and learnings, modified, added, closed it and held for themselves.

delichon 2y ago

> keep producing world class devices at reasonable prices At the current price points can you really recommend a Core One over an X1 to someone with a tight budget? Without resorting to arguments about open platforms and the big picture?

kiba 2y ago
I took a look at the price. They're almost comparable if X1/AMS combo wasn't (always?) on sale.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Kirby64 2y ago
The better comparison is a Core One vs a P1S/P1P. You can almost buy two P1 printers for the price of a Core One.
- bangaladore 2y ago
  Disagree. The better comparison is Core One vs X1E. As frankly the main selling point of the X1E is Active Chamber Heating. With your logic you can also say you can just get 2 P1S printers instead of an X1C, but an X1C is still sells just fine.
  - Kirby64 2y ago
    The Core One doesn’t have chamber heating, it just has chamber exhaust. Not the same thing.
    - bangaladore 2y ago
      Thanks for the correction, it does not have a dedicated chamber heater. But I don't think simplifying it to "chamber exhaust" is correct. It sounds like the real claim is the device can actively keep the chamber at 55C. Other than semantics, I don't understand how this is different from having a dedicated chamber heater. I can close my X1C, but it won't maintain any stable temperature. The bed and nozzle are heating the chamber. This is all assuming the time to get to 55C is reasonable, and that 55C is enough. I personally have a need for 55C chamber often, but never 100C (X1E can only get to 60C). Again, feel free to correct if I'm wrong, but directly from Prusa: "The automatic ventilation system and active temperature control"
      - Kirby64 2y ago
        The way they describe the active chamber management in their blog post is basically to say “the enclosure allows it to reach temps as high as 55C, but you can keep it enclosed and drop the temperature so you can print PLA and PETG”. There might be some insulation perhaps, but getting to 55C is not particularly hard on almost any printer. Uninsulated printers with enclosures that are reasonably tight will hit 55C no problem. Add some insulation and you can hit 70C pretty reasonably all without any chamber heating.
bangaladore 2y ago
Firstly, neither of these are "budget". I think if you need a budget, you a probably best sticking to a Prusa Mini, Bambu P1s or A1 Mini. Without a doubt. An X1 is 1k USD. This is 1,199 USD. Truly this is a competitor to the X1E though which costs 2.5k (!!!) with basically the only notable addition being the heated chamber (which the Core 1 comes with for free). I have multiple Prusa Mark 3s, a Prusa XL and an X1 carbon, and frankly I only use the Prusa XL nowadays (and sometimes the Mark 3s). Bambu makes a good printer, but it has lots of annoying issues and proprietary annoyances. I also don't like them as a company, but that wouldn't prevent me from buying another if I needed and used it. In my experience Prusa printers "just work" more often than Bambu printers do.
- Miraste 2y ago
  It's worth noting that the X1 is on sale today. Normally it's $1199 as well.
- Kirby64 2y ago
  Frankly, the only advantage I see from a spec list for the Core One is a chamber exhaust (not heater, just exhaust). Compared to a P1P it’s missing a camera. Compared to the X1C it’s missing a camera, the LiDAR, and carbon rods. Also, the AMS solution on Bambu printers is much better than the MMU by Prusa.
  - bangaladore 2y ago
    > Compared to a P1P it’s missing a camera. Built in yes, and that's disappointing to see. Unsure why they aren't just including that at this point. Assuming its like the XL, you can use any camera you can find (phone, rpi, esp) and link it to the printer to get a "first party" > Compared to the X1C it’s missing a camera, the LiDAR, and carbon rods. I never use the LiDAR on my X1C. In my opinion is produces worse results then calibrating manually. Agree on the camera. Regarding carbon rods, I would be surprised if it made any tangible difference to 99.99% of people. > Also, the AMS solution on Bambu printers is much better than the MMU by Prusa. Agreed. I never use AMS or MMU. For some its a dealbreaker to not have something as good as AMS. I never print multi material, other than using multiple heads on the XL.
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
Why would I recommend anyone buy a printer that cannot be repaired? That’s just throwing money away and creating e-waste. Even a Prusa Mk4 makes more sense than the X1 when you consider repairability.
- gamblor956 2y ago
  Bambu sells replacement parts for their printers. Very little of the printer is not repairable.
  - jonwest 2y ago
    Not only does Bambu sell parts, but there’s a pretty healthy market of third party parts as well. Saying these printers are irreparable is plain false.
- Kirby64 2y ago
  At some point the value proposition makes sense. People buy non repairable 2D printers all the time. Also, as the other commenter noted, they actually are quite repairable. Bambu offers pretty much every part you could imagine and at prices that are extremely reasonable. Any wear component you’d expect is easy to replace.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > At some point the value proposition makes sense. People buy non repairable 2D printers all the time. Where can I buy a repairable 2D printer? I would prefer this if I could make a choice.
    - Kirby64 2y ago
      Anything commercial that is also the size of a small fridge. You don't actually want one.
- esskay 2y ago
  Have you looked at the parts shop? You absolutely can repair a Bambu printer, and as someone with a farm of the things can attest that it's no more complex than working on Prusa's. You still need to buy the parts from somewhere. Bambu's own pricing on parts is pretty reasonable in my opinion.

diggan 2y ago

> Too much stealing of the open source work How do you steal Open Source? Can Pruse no longer use it themselves or something? Sounds wrong calling "companies creating products from other projects" stealing when the intention from the beginning is that others can freely use the created project for whatever. > This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Open Source works until it doesn't Isn't those examples that Open Source builds great software? Companies trying to wrestle control of projects after making them Open Source doesn't mean what's already there didn't have a great impact.

mschuster91 2y ago
> How do you steal Open Source? Can Pruse no longer use it themselves or something? Sounds wrong calling "companies creating products from other projects" stealing when the intention from the beginning is that others can freely use the created project for whatever. Thing is, the fundamentals of Open Source have changed over the last decades - and the assumptions people made Back Then no longer hold. Let me expand a bit: Back in the late 80s and 90s, up until the early '00s a lot of popular open source software was developed by academic institutions or with scientific grants. For them, it didn't matter - the money way paid for anyway and sharing source code fits with the ideals of science. In some projects it's very clear that they have an academic history - my to-go example is OpenStack, the myriads of knobs it has absorbed over the years all come from universities wishing to integrate whatever leftover hardware they had. But ever since academic funding all but dried up, life has gotten difficult. We got a few rockstar projects that manage to survive independently (cURL), godknowshow (OpenSSL), with consulting services (sqlite with their commercial comprehensive test suite, mysql, mariadb, psql), on corporate contributions (Linux kernel, ReactJS/Facebook), on donations (everything in the FOSS graveyard better known as Apache) or, like Prusa, on hardware they sell. The general idea behind many projects is the implicit assumption: if you use a project commercially and the developer has a commercial support platform, be so kind and pay the original developers a bit so they can improve upon the project. The problem is when juggernauts with deep money pits, be it companies with net market values in the trillions of dollar range or companies being under influence of the CCP, come on the field and take the hard work of others to make money without contributing back either financially or with code. Legally, they are absolutely in the clear, if the project isn't under AGPL, CC-NC or other such terms. ElasticSearch got ripped off that way by AWS for example. It's not stealing in a traditional sense, but it is breaking the ethos and expectations.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> This isn't remotely shocking, just look at Redis, Elastic and many many others... Open Source works until it doesn't. I would argue that redis and elastic are signs that open source does work, albeit not well as a for-profit business. Open source hardware has a completely different set of problems.

fragmede 2y ago
If it doesn't work well for such high profile names, why would we expect it to work at all for an unheard of nobody? Doesn't that mean that kpen source doesn't actually work?
- diggan 2y ago
  > If it doesn't work well for such high profile names What, exactly, doesn't work well? Almost anybody knows of Redis and ElasticSearch, many of the ideas they implement spread in the ecosystem and everyone can still use the old versions as the FOSS they were made as. If you're talking about that they were unable to build a for-profit on top of giving software away for free without any concrete plans on how to actually make money, yeah, that might not have been sustainable. But that makes it sound like their business plans were what didn't work, the Open Source part seems to have worked out just fine for what the purpose is, to give away software for free.
- guax 2y ago
  I think it depends a lot of what one see as a success and "make it work". If we think that success is only high earning, growing forever, vc fuelled companies, then no. Open source will never work for that.

kiba 2y ago

Those clones that you speaks of are often of questionable quality. Unless we're talking about creality printers, which were open source(at least with the Ender 3), and are also low quality. But my question is "what's the point?" If you have an open source project and yet the commmunity is largely uninvolved in its development, why do you even care to be open source? Yes, freedom is important, but hardly anybody but developers take advantage of it. The most important aspect of FOSS is that it's a marker of a project/product that won't take advantages of its users with shady business practices, and that's probably the most important thing about it.

Miraste 2y ago

The main issue with this move is that it's not going to cut down on clones very much. Chinese 3D printer companies already clone all kinds of parts from other companies that don't provide design files, including stuff very similar to the now-proprietary extruder. They won't need to spend much effort replicating it. The people who lose out the most are open-source hardware hobbyists.

TaylorAlexander 2y ago

Prusa gave everyone permission to make copies of their i3 series machines, make modifications, and distribute modified versions. It’s not theft if you have been given explicit permission to make copies. “You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty.” “You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above.” https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICENSE https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICEN...

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> Prusa gave everyone permission to make copies of their i3 series machines, make modifications, and distribute modified versions. It’s not theft if you have been given explicit permission to make copies. Indeed. But I guess Prusa also expected that people will buy the original such that this support this open-source mission can be sustained. This is where I personally see Prusa's fallacy of thinking.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Sure, their choice to give it away may not have gone as they hoped, I’m just pushing back against the idea that making copies of a thing the creator explicitly gave permission to copy is “stealing”. The core of open source is that making and distributing modified or unmodified copies is good. Calling it stealing undermines the very important social work we can do with open source.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > The core of open source is that making and distributing modified or unmodified copies is good. The core is not that it is "good", only that it is allowed (i.e. we won't sue you if you do).
- 2y ago

rajnathani 2y ago

Besides Apple, which other <$2000 electronics/hardware purchase isn’t “open”? As in you can buy parts for repair/upgradability right?

nicman23 2y ago

this is such a bad take. there is a huge subset of the community that made contributions to 3d printing both randoms and other companies. ie bambu pushing the slicers and printers to actually not be dead slow

guax 2y ago

I don't think the cheap clones were ever the problem. Prusa changed gears more heavily when Bambu came, took the code, ideas and learnings, modified, added, closed it and held for themselves.