Prusa Core One

Random or Off Topic
41

I’ve been pretty surprised. My A5M is presently the best printer in my collection. (admittedly, some are dinosaurs like my frankenstien [heavily modified] Taz 5.). I’ve seen others that had nothing but problems right out of the box with the A5M.

Maybe. I’m very aware that Ryan’s walk is right on the edge- which is a factor in why I choose to provide support to the community here. I know what my time is worth, and that is adding considerable value to the V1 machines.

Ryan isn’t fully open source either, in that the design CAD for the routers are not open, only the models are provided. That’s a bummer, but I do understand and agree it’s the only viable choice.

I wouldn’t buy copied machine but I know a lot of folks would.

I’ve also told Ryan repeatedly that the boards are under priced for what they are. Jackpot should be selling for $30 or so more based on its’ capabilities and openness. Ryan wants to keep these machines accessible to the enthusiast community and it’s a big part of why I keep supporting with both my time and my wallet.

Prusa’s MMU is good. So are a lot of other Prusa things, like the strain gauge based printer bed leveling or the mulit-zone bed heater. All of those are being copied or similar features being added to the cheapie clone army.

I just saw a local maker’s homebrew 24 position tradrack work. Whoa, was that a thing to see. Progress on these changers will continue- but I don’t see the Prusa MMU as radically superior at all.

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42

I saw this the other night. I was kinda happy I didn’t see any features on it that were better than what I currently have with my MP3DPv4. Just polished.

43

Flashforge is actually much worse for the open source community, and have gone as far as now taking the source code of Orca Slicer, producing their own Orca-Flashforge, and violating the open source license

And remember, there is no OrcaSlicer to begin with without Prusa developing PrusaSlicer well enough that Bambu took it, which led to OrcaSlicer then being forked from there.

I haven’t bought from any of them, but when it comes to open source, Prusa has done more for the open source community, especially in the 3D printing arena, than any of the other ones.

I would feel way better about spending money with Prusa than with Bambu or Flashforge, if open source had anything to do with my feelings about the respective companies.

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44

And PrusaSlicer wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t started with Slic3r.
Prusa has definately used a bunch of open source as basis for past work.
They’ve historically been pretty good about it- which is why I liked them.

Note that one reason I bought an A5M is to make a GPL source request since I’ve most decidely now recieved a product using the GPL’d work.

Not for future purchases based on their own stated objectives.

All of this is one reason I started building an MP3DP V4 which will instead become a V5.
I need to get back to working on that.

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45

Yes, but there’s quite a difference in spare time open source development, compared to a company hiring a development team and paying them to expand open source software.

PrusaSlicer is miles ahead of where Slic3r left off.

Bambu Studio rebranded and added some things to help their own product line, while tearing out useful things to the detriment of the overall product.

OrcaSlicer devs are still getting requests to this day to reinstate functionality that Bambu removed for no apparent reason.

A company can’t survive purely on open source when Chinese companies can not be held accountable to abide by the rules.

People have already filed complaints etc with the FSF…

There is nothing that can be done if a Chinese company is unresponsive.

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46

I’m sorry, but I am no less confused. The following is no doubt argumentative - it’s meant to highlight the reasons for my confusion!

I understand what you are saying, that some point in the future IF Prusa go closed source then they have less value to you.
AGAIN - this is not a question of blindly supporting my teams as it is better than yours If I could have used alternative made up names to avoid the obvious I would.

OK I presume you are talking about the firmware - that’s not even remotely close to my realm of understanding so I hope you can forgive my confusion. Why would anyone want to do that? :rofl: :rofl:

It’s funny how our own cognitive bias let’s us read what we want to see. In the quote from Jo Prusa you linked to, this is what I saw, and it seems pretty clear to me that the intent for desktop printers is to continue as is - sometimes with a bit of a delay in publishing of course. (Bold text is from the original)

  • We stand by our roots in open-source and will continue to do so.
  • Our desktop 3D printers will always be open source. We intend to continue publishing plastic parts, along with firmware source codes.
  • We will stay open to third-party component manufacturers, accessories, add-ons, and unofficial upgrades.
  • PrusaSlicer will always be open source.
  • Our investment in PrusaSlicer and firmware development will continue at the same or higher level.

Note that Prusa’s stated core business is in the commercial realm - some of their products are selling with a base price in excess of $100k - I don’t believe there is a single player in that space that is in any way open source (except maybe for SpaceX! :rofl:)

This is what triggered my question - my understanding is that they do, and continue to do so. I am confused by this.

I have offered my view on this above, but again, open source is not absent, it may be slightly blurred, but it’s not absent.

None of that is a secret, they properly attribute every contributor to the projects in great detail.

Some of the opposition hold it up to be it’s own work. One very large company in particular, copies, makes modifications and does not submit them to the community. I will stand corrected on this, but was it not Flashforge (?) only a year or two ago who after slicing out the attribution, did a cut and paste on the word “Prusa”, but forgot “Research”? Among some geeky types who actually read lines of code (you know who you are) a very funny week of “<insert name of company here> Research” jokes followed, along with a week of sadness and vitriol.

If it wasn’t Flashforge I apologise, but it was one of it’s countrymen, it’s not Prusa which is killing open source, it’s behaviour like that, which sadly is now the norm. Coupled with that race to patent open source materia, but that’s way off track!

There are no winners there, but it’s polarized us all.

I still don’t understand why, in the face of such obvious and blatant opposition, Prusa is attacked for trying, yet those that don’t are supported? That’s my puzzle.

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47

I don’t know if it was Flashforge in your case, but I do know that they

  • forked Orca Slicer, and have released it under a commercial, non-permissive license as Orca-Flashforge
  • allegedly (I have not verified) forked their own version of Klipper for firmware with no attribution or code release
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48

Well Fork Me!!! I was really kinda digging orcaslicer!!! So is there still an open version?

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Yes, Orca Slicer is still an active project.

I’m referring to Orca-Flashforge, which they provide for download under a GPL non-compatible license on their website, breaking the terms of the GPL license of the OrcaSlicer project

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50

Got it

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51

Did you read this article. The title is click bait, but the text is pretty fair (I think).

Jim and you and Mike may disagree on how valuable these open source contributions are. But that seems like the truth of the situation to me.

The STLs for the printed parts are available. The firmware code is available. The bootloader, the board schematic, and several parts are not OSHW. That looks like the state to me.

I’ll save you my opinions on where to spend money. I haven’t ever convinced anyone to buy a Prusa and I haven’t bought one myself. So changing that now is going to have zero impact to the printer economies.

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52

We did discuss the article above. It also mentions that you can now sideload different firmware without voiding the warranty and that you can repair every aspect of your printer. So I’d say they actually made the printer more open with not voiding the warranty if you broke the seal.

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53

Somewhat. It is absolutely fair to call me out on my position, which I acknowledge is inconsistent.

Prusa used to be clearly committed to open source, but after those statements they then put in the “appendix” or whatever and made it clear that changing firmware would void warranty. (They since backed off). It looks clear to me that their actions are not consistent with the previous and stated position. The slippery slope to stratasys behavior is under way.

All that said, Prusa does have a good product, a good heritage and their behavior moving forward will shape how I respond to them.

I own multiple FlashForge printers, a literal pile of BTT electronics, and even in other areas walk a funky line. I know they are GPL violators, much like GL.Inet in the consumer WiFi router world. Yet, I still have GL.I gear which I put OpenWRT on.

As another example, I have a genuine GreatScott gadgets HackRF one. In the SDR radio world there’s now a chinese clone of an SDR family where the clone has double the number of TX/RX chains, with a better Zynk FPGA, and at half the cost of the Pluto SDR it copies. 4x better cost/capability.

That starts to get compelling even in light of wanting to support the original creators.

I have YAESU ham radio gear but also own several Chinese copies. The YAESU never had a line of source shared, and the Chinese gear is now highly hackable. I’ve had YAESU service manuals with schematics, but have never seen one line of the chinese designs. The RF sections of the YAESU are well designed, while the other gear is marginally crap by comparison.

I know my behavior is inconsistent and it’s at least partially driven by the price determining whether I can do or can’t do a project. It’s also driven by whether I can study a design and learn from it, which for me is compelling. I"m admittedly in the minority there.

It still leaves me in that comparison $1200 for a decent, still partially open printer, or $300 for a nearly as capable machine that I can replace electronics and firmware on later… Yeah, that’s a dilema for me.

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54

I am in your camp, Jim. I didn’t mean to put you on the outside. I just wanted to have a position in the middle where we can at least agree on the facts.

I am a software engineer and almost every tool I have used professionally is open source. The few exceptions (vxworks and workbench) are crazy expensive ($20k/dev/year) and were not as good as the FOSS alternatives. That radicalizes me to think that everything is better as FOSS.

But I have also had my software sold to other businesses and I can tell you that it would not be the right choice for our company to offer it as FOSS and then politely ask for support.

The real solution is piracy. If piracy was the biggest problem, then FOSS would look a lot better. No need to worry about people stealing ideas if you just give it away for free.

Well, that didn’t even last half a day.

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55

Well, Kant would say it’s the intention that counts… :sweat_smile:

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signal-2025-07-11-15-21-25-272
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Woop. Going to be back from my holidays in two days. :slightly_smiling_face:

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57

Are you there yet?

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58

NOOOO stop bullying me! :smiley:

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59

Told you the new MMU enclosure was a hat…

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60

Stop dicking around and build it! Is that
@Tokoloshe cam growing from your head? Nice of them to put a hole in the lid in exactly the right place!

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