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.
Comment on The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?
John@discuss.tchncs.de 5 weeks agoe , features , comfort and support. As long
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.
grue@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
It’s a race to the bottom line. The endless flight of the working class: funnel-fed the products of each other’s work for the price of obedience. Viva La Revolution, coming this season everywhere you stream.
LeTak@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
Maybe a little out of context but this reminds me of the Sony Helldiver 2 situation. If people get loud enough they can infect change things. No one got loud or boycotted games that had Kernel level AntiCheat , this could have been avoided. Same with Bamboo I guess, if people still buy them after the Firmware and Cloud thing , it probably will happen again.
IceFoxX@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
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.
Lv_InSaNe_vL@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
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.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works 5 weeks ago
I wonder if any of that includes what are essentially firmware tuning for their printers?
I recently ran a set of prebuilt Prusa M4S for a printing demo, and they were really nicely tuned, between the pressure sensing head and the way it only probes the area of the print bed it’s going to use, all 10 printers worked pretty much out of the box. One roll of filament wasn’t sealed properly and clogged a few times, but I basically did around 800-900 hours of printing over the course of a weekend and had a couple clogs from that one roll.
IceFoxX@lemm.ee 5 weeks ago
I can only advise every first-time buyer not to choose a prebuilt but to assemble it themselves in order to learn everything directly and gain experience. I bought the mk4 prebuild as my first 3d printer with enclodure and it worked wonderfully. Except for problems at the beginning due to wet filament etc. but it’s not due to the printer itself. Then I installed the MMU3 later when it was available. After that I had slight problems, especially first layer problems, which I was able to fix. then the release of the mk4s so I ordered and installed the upgrade. Initially had massive problems which I would not have had if I had assembled the printer myself and had experience. The troubleshooting was unnecessarily time-consuming as I had practically disassembled and reassembled the printer but was still successful. At some point (after several successful start-ups and printers) I started up the printer and wanted to print something. Since it had always run smoothly before and never had any really bad problems, I sat at the PC with headphones on until I looked at the printer and saw that it wanted to become a CNC. Printing plate damaged but still usable, nozzle damaged but could be repaired, heater and thermistor destroyed. The support was very cooperative but of course I got the heater and thermistor replaced as they are not wearing parts. I am still extremely happy and can only warmly recommend prusa