Many people don’t care about FOSS or don’t know the benefits, they just want a NOW working product. Many belief in the goodness that nothing bad will happen, and if something happens, they still can switch. I often have this discussion with other colleagues and friends, it’s an endless debate of price , features , comfort and support. As long as there is both on the market , why argue? People can buy what fits their needs.
My opinion on bad manufacturer behavior is: if we keep buying those products(with locked down firmware, Windows-Only Proprietary Cloud filled forked Slicers etc.) more and more manufacturers may go that route.
The problem is people's stinginess. They want to save money and buy from China. The manufacturers help themselves to the OSS community but do not contribute anything - on the contrary, the manufacturers undercut the OSS alternatives enormously. They have no development costs or anything else to compensate. So that the OSS solutions do not finance the development for other companies and push themselves out of the market, the only option is to lock it in. It's the people who want to get into an expensive hobby on the cheap.
Edit: example about developing stats.
PrusaSlicer
PrusaSlicer is our own open-source in-house developed slicer software. The PrusaSlicer team consists of 13 full time developers. As of January 2024, we spent a total of 145,720 work hours developing PrusaSlicer (that’s over 16 years of non-stop work by one developer). While only about 10% of the original code remains, we are still extremely proud that PrusaSlicer is originally based on the open-source project Slic3r by Alessandro Ranellucci. Each of the source files has a short header with the list of all contributors. We believe this is the right way to acknowledge whose shoulders we're standing upon.
PrusaSlicer is a completely free, feature-rich, frequently updated tool that contains everything you need to export the perfect G-code for your 3D printer. Today, the PrusaSlicer code powers most slicers on the market.
Prusa is based in Prague, and according to some quick googling the average software developer in Prague makes 88k CZK (~3800 USD or ~3500 eur), so about 526 CZK/hr (~22/hr in both USD and EUR).
Which means they've potentially spent around 76.7 million CZK (~3.3 million USD, ~3 million EUR) into their slicer. Just for salaries.
Luckily for us, the original RepRap folks were smart enough to go for copyleft rather than permissive licensing. As such, the common firmwares and slicers are both using GPLv3 code, severely limiting the companies' ability to do that.
It's a race to the bottom line. The endless plight of the working class: funnel-fed the products of each other's work for the price of obedience. Viva La Revolution, coming this fall everywhere you stream.
We have become so normalized to anti consumer behavior it doesn’t even matter anymore
Like it used to be that a videogame manufacturer charged for a dlc that was already on the game disc, you had to pay to unlock data that you technically had purchased but not licensed, and people threw a fucking fit. Now it’s like “this new tech device will only work if you insert $20 bills every 30 minutes” and people are like “oh well that sucks but what are you gonna do? I need a toaster that can send me a notification when my toast is done”
Fuck the companies that do anti consumer bullshit, fuck the youtuber dummies that normalize it because they got $50 and a free shitty printer, fuck the government that has completely failed to regulate anything, and fuck the dummies who constantly enable this nonsense because they refuse to spend 10 minutes researching their purchases and instead spend the rest of their life in credit card debt because they have $1100 in monthly subscriptions to stupid bullshit that makes their stuff work for 18 months until the company goes bankrupt, their device is bricked, and they replace it with another piece of shit that has the same anticonsumer bullshit
All these companies lose. Everyone hates them. They are milking their brands of any reputation because they think the world is ending and wants all money. There are compassionate companies with humans that do not do this. They are not hated. You should choose them
It's just like everything else with technology. As soon as the "normies" start buying into it everything goes to shit. They don't know what to look for and just buy whatever's easiest. Once it gets that far the manufacturers can do whatever they want
All the Youtubers Bambu sponsors are like, "I was terrified of 3D printing. Wasn't that something only nerds do? Then Bambu sent me a free 3D printer and several hundred dollars and I'm telling you guys, you don't even need a brain to use it!!!"
Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.
I mean, most people don't care. How often do you see mainstream smartphone reviewers making a single mention of the insane amount of bloatware and spyware on phones, or calling out Apple for their unrepairable devices? Shit just blows over eventually and consumers accept it for what it is. 3D printers are not exempt from this mentality.
Jeff Geerling made a video today about how he bought a dishwasher that was top-rated by ~~RTINGS~~ Consumer Reports with no mention of the fact that in order to make it do a God damn thing, you have to connect it to the app, create an account, and connect it to them OEM's cloud.
Several years ago I bought a DJI action cam and it was the same thing. You can't do jack shit with it without connecting it to an app and creating an account. I watched dozens of reviews and this was never mentioned. I returned it but I'm sure 99.9% either don't give a fuck or accepted it.
When I'm shopping for cell phones and reading reviews a routinely see comments about the amount of bloatware embedded on various manufacturer's devices. People actually do care about it, reviewers actually do write about it.
It is simply an entry level thing. You will find this in every market.
In a bike shop retail market I can sell you a serviceable bike for $500 that will last, or an $800 road bike you'll actually ride. Still the majority of bikes sold come from places like Walmart where they are made of unserviceable junk and are mostly nonfunctional. These are rarely ever ridden and often thrown away. In the shop I'll sell 20:1 on the cheapest model to the next options up the ladder.
It is strange to adapt to this kind of understanding at first, like just how skewed the real market is. I can target selling to clubs and teams but I can't touch the the garbage bike market where most people reside.
I think we are at a point where the influx of people into 3d printing are not real Makers or have any aspirations to be.
The reality is that people are often simply stupid. They seem to think that saving a few bucks here or there is smart but are not bright enough to see that everyone doing the same thing are buying the junk product over and over. There is nothing more expensive than being a cheap miser.
Ultimately, the only person that can fix stupid is ourselves. One can only inspire others to learn but can never force them. You cannot fix stupid in others. In the USA, stupidity is political currency and we have a long tradition of poor education and standardized exploitation. It is the American dream.
I think LDO and Voron are the only super relevant open source torchbearers.
well put
Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say "Yo dog, take it down a notch"
I think there are two big aspects to this.
The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don't actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.
Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a "prosumer" hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but...) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer... because that model works a lot better for print farms.
And, as an aside before I get to the "real" point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And.. that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can't spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.
And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize "reverse sear" cooking.
So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what "the paper trick" was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you... probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because... they were pain points.
And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.
Which... not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has "Make them great (again)". Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.
I just want a printer that doesn't require you to upload your gcode to their cloud server before getting permission from them to print.
Just wondering, is this "trend" you're talking about just the Bambulab situation, or are other manufacturers doing the same? I'm not super up to date on 3d printing news, so not sure if i missed more such changes.
If it's the bambulab situation, it's not entirely unexpected. When they started people were already worried about exactly this seeing how closed their ecosystem is. Then again, they did make a printer that just works better than the competition, and that's in the end what attracts users.
Personally i have diy 3d printers that i built myself, really happy with them, but for people who just want to print things, many other filament printers are just too annoying to work with. Not everyone is into diy, and many people just want to make cool stuff and not care about the printer, and bambulab really made the next step towards achieving that.
So if the open source community wants to compete with that, they must make printers that are as user friendly. My diy 3d printers are like running linux. Really great and customizable if you like to work on 3d printers, and really reliable now i as an expert built & tuned them. But most people just want to buy a machine that works, and that's not these open source printers. And as long as we just focus on making 3d printers for expert diy'ers, we'll end up in the same place as linux is for OS'es: used by experts and for specific advanced usecases, but beyond reach for the common user that's then stuck on systems like apple/windows that are more locked down, but actually just work without having to understand how the entire thing works.
Besides the others that were mentioned, Prusa is moving away from open source.
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/20/with-core-one-prusas-open-source-hardware-dream-quietly-dies/
I think there's some semantic confusion with that article. That's not what I see. There are literally kits for sale on the Prusa Site to convert your old prusa into a new Core. imho, What the 'RepRap Open Source folks' mean is literally every part is sourced from already available parts or can be printed. And I think this is where the article is going. The other Open Source -is Open Ecosystem. Where there may be proprietary pieces (the steel cage), but nothing about it is purposefully closed. Prusa published the full electronic and hardware schematics before the machine was shipping. https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_236812/ This is also 'Open'. Both are good. Both have valid rationale. But neither is anything like closed source, closed box, only we can touch it companies models.
Hard disagree. Prusas used to be completely open source. Now they merely have open source components. It isn't accurate to call them open source.
Would you call Windows or MacOS open source? Both Microsoft and Apple have made parts of their OS's open source, but that doesn't mean the entire product is open source.
The link was to the engineering diagrams for their hardware. Literally open.
This would be Microsoft selling 'Teams' and including a dvd with the source.
Anycubic for example does similar things. The Kobra 3 & Kobra S1 support Network printing(via Cloud) only through there "Anycubic Slicer Next" which is a Orca Slicer Fork only available for MacOS and Windows(Windows seems to be the only up-to-date Version, Mac is broken as far as i know).
Firmware is, as far as i know the so called KobraOS, a Klipper-go fork without a Webfrontend or any way to connect to it through Orca, Cura, Prusa or else.
Haven't heard much about that yet, indeed also sounds bad. But it's anycubic so who cares :p.
But yeah, it's indeed not the best trend. But it also up to open source to actually compete with this, and not just chase shiny features, but also usability...
Next time I need a new 3D printer I'm either buying a Prusa or building from a kit. Bambu has nothing I can't get somewhere else, and I'll pay extra to have a printer that doesn't come pre-infected with corporate malware.
Some people want to 3d print for a hobby, while some want 3d printers as a hobby. You are the second type, while out of the box printers are for the first type.
Personally what kept me away from 3d printing my own terrain for miniature wargames is that I don't have time for another hobby. I just can't be bothered with endless fiddling with settings, temperatures, speed, and all that. But I understand your feelings
They try to keep it as simple as possible so that really everyone can start printing if they like to. For our luck, we got companies like Prusa and Creality that still allow modifications and have a big community.
I would name Sovol as a good and cheap producer. The plain Klipper(or on older Devices Marlin)-Firmware is really nice :)
Isnt the Creality-K* Lineup also locked down?
I have a Bambu A1, and yes it really is a great printer. The firmware BS is crossing a line though, and that company will not get another dollar from me. My next printer will be a Prusa or a Voron.
Btw most would rather read your own writing rather an ai. When my students edit with ai it’s typically pretty obvious and I think it wastes everyone’s time. Also, foreign students frequently write much better than the native English ones at my school, idk why. I bet your writing is better than you think :)
I own a BambuLab A1M as I want a printer that just works. And while yes it is all proprietary they do sell replacement parts for most parts.
While I will not forgive them for their latest moves I am quite happy, I turn it on, load an stl into BambuStudio and let it run without any issues at all.
My next printer will however probably be a prusa as they are Europeans and I love that they keep everything up to the user so far. But I can not deal with anything that is more DIY than a Prusa, it is a tool for my hobby...not the hobby itself.
they do sell replacement parts for most parts.
If you can't replace all of the parts with some other off the shelf part, regardless of quality, then you're locked to a brand and are at their mercy.
What happens when they inevitably discontinue the A1M and no longer sell parts for it?
- this is what going mainstream looks like. Greedy people see profit and they get in.
- greedy people are often sneaky, and they work to take all the can from open and close it in : Apple, Later Redhat
- there are tons of Open Open printers out there
- Open has a problem - it's hard to maintain ignorance and get the benefit. It requires work - you can't just easily trade dollars for someone else's labor. You have to learn and put things together to really enjoy.
- What can you do?
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This is hard, almost impossible: Don't do business with people you suspect or know are cruddy. Even if they say they have what you want.
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Learn how to build the printer you want. Hire a good person to learn and do it for you.
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Buy a printer from a company that pledges to do right. Even if it costs more.
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It's giving me serious pause when looking at things like the new Bambu printer
I really like my x1c, but I haven't upgraded it's firmware yet, and probably never will, because the local features are just too good. I know I can replace a lot of the bambu cloud features with octoanywhere, but I shouldn't have to
I don't understand why this is such a big deal. There is no huge open source scene for regular printers. Because it's a tool, not a hobby. People want a print on paper and move on. This gatekeeping gotta go: It's holding 3D printing back. Bambu did for 3D printing what Apple did for mobile phones: They made 3D printing clean, simple and easy. If you want to fiddle around with custom firmware and usability hacks and cobbled together components, power to you. I'll be over here, actually printing things.
Can’t wait for the thing I bought and own to suddenly cost $5 a month
I suspect an important angle, at least for Bambu Lab, is AI. That's why they are selling printers with expensive Lidar units at a competitive price (the X1C). The Lidar data adds a key part to AI training sets: print outcome. They could use this to train more AI models to improve their own products. I believe this is why they are first pushing the firmware update to X1C models.
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