but all proprietary and as locked down as possible hatdware-wise.
There’s no DRM in the hardware. It isn’t locked down at all. There are 3rd party hotends already. Not even Prusa has open source hardware now.
I am fairly confident they will follow a similar path even though they have made some software source - available.
They have released all firmware source code. So it doesn’t matter what they do in the future. You have control over your hardware for forever.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 5 days ago
I don’t think so. Or to put it differently: there is no fully open-source 3D printer any more.
The only relevant parts of the Snapmaker U1 that actually seem to be proprietary are the hotends/extruders. These are also proprietary for newer Prusa or E3D stuff.
And compared to some of the newer Prusa printers, you don’t have to physically snap off part of the mainboard to flash custom firmware onto the U1. Snapmaker doesn’t even void your warranty for using custom firmware, as long as the firmware doesn’t damage the hardware and you manage to back-flash stock firmware.
I mean, any company can turn from FOSH to proprietary, same as E3D and Prusa, even though both of them were real FOSH champions. The issue is that if you do FOSH, you are essentially developing for your competitors.
E3D spent years of development to come up with great nozzles, Hotends and so on, and they have to factor that into their product prices. So when it comes to the customers buying parts, they have the choice between an €70 one from E3D or an €6 one from Aliexpress. Or anything in between, often quality products from name-brand seller for a fraction of the price of a real E3D one.
In the end, E3D ends up unable to compete in the market they created. That’s unsustainable.
In general, open source works well for stuff that isn’t the main product. Angular works well as open source because Google doesn’t have a way to sell it. Google monetizes their web apps built with Angular, so they have an incentive to maintain and improve Angular, but they can’t monetize it directly, so open sourcing it helps get more eyes on the code, so that others can find bugs and vulnerabilities from them.
Open source works good as a marketing device for non-essential parts. People do buy e.g. open printers because that means they won’t get vendor lock-in and people can create custom firmware to fix issues, add improvements and support the product after the company stopped first-party support.
But it’s sadly unsustainable if you are just handing the plans to the competition, asking them to please undercut and replace you.
And yes, as a FOSH and FOSS developer myself, this hurts. But so far there hasn’t been an actual solution for the issue.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m pretty sure Voron is fully open source.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I could have been more explicit. I was talking about commercial FOSH. While there are some companies selling Voron kits, afaik they are all taking the role of the “copycats” and aren’t first-party. AFAIK, Voron is developed completely non-commercially.