Josef clearly cares about being as open as possible, but has bumped up against the fact that companies like Bambu can just take their designs and extend them with things they don't share, and sell a product with more features and a lower price.
replyUnfortunately, it seems like the fully open source business model doesn't work well when you can be undercut by extremely cheap labor from another country and a company that doesn't share or reciprocate your values.
It sucks. Also, fuck Bambu.
That other country is the company- and it can subsidize the frontend which you call a company with money earned by other monopoly frontends.
replyThink of china less as a country and more as one huge Chaebol.
Share what? Nothing what Bambu is doing is remotely secret. There are no mystery sauce to figure out. Prusa genuinely got outflanked by Bambu when it comes to designing a printer.
replyBut yes, fuck bambu.
They forked the slicer, and then put the networking part in a plugin that gets downloaded after you open it purely so they don't have to share the source for it as the rest of the slicer is GPL.
replyI still remember running Red Hat Linux when it was free and open source, before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, before Fedora, before CentOS, before RockyOS...
replyIt's tough to build a business around a product that takes a lot of capital to build, and you offer for free to your competitors...