(Author here.) I agree with you, there are several factors at play in what happened to MakerBot. I believe Bre learned the wrong lesson -- going closed might ha

(Author here.) I agree with you, there are several factors at play in what happened to MakerBot. I believe Bre learned the wrong lesson -- going closed might have looked like the obvious solution to their drop in sales. But the one huge advantage MakerBot had over their competitors (and the cloners) was the good will and support from the open source community. With that support gone after going closed, MakerBot had to sink or swim on its own. I think they could have found a way to stay open while dealing with concerns of revealing future plans. For one, they could have kept the plans closed during development, but released all the plans on launch, forcing their competitors to play catch-up. As a user, I wouldn't necessarily need access to future designs for future models, but definitely would want designs to the current model that I owned. But anyway, I now buy LulzBot 3D printers, which are fully open. The latest version is TAZ 5.0. I can't tell, though, just by looking at the LulzBot online repo [1] if plans for future versions are also posted there ahead of official release. [1]: http://download.lulzbot.com/TAZ/ http://download.lulzbot.com/TAZ/ [Edit] LulzBot is more awesome than I thought. They post the source for future versions that they're working on, too: http://devel.lulzbot.com/TAZ/README.html http://devel.lulzbot.com/TAZ/README.html "'Kauri' - EVT version of the next printer after TAZ 5.0"