3DPrinting
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I admit this is speculation, but I got the impression that Prusa is moving away from open source because they're salty about other companies cloning their products and selling them much cheaper than the "original" parts. Proprietary parts, patents, etc. is of course worse for the user than a fully open ecosystem, but he isn't necessarily going full anti-consumer.
@fhein @rikudou I think it was easy for them to stay FOSS when they had not "real" competition, now that they lacking behind BL, they got emotional and started kicking around.
My 2cents.
Seems pretty spot on and it has been this way for years. Even in 2020 when I bought my first printer, Prusa was charging $1,000 for a printer that everyone else was selling for $300-$400. They only maintained through that due to good will from the community and the rest of the market outside of Creality being little cottage-type businesses that weren't selling high volume.
Even now in addition to the closed-source boards, they have a closed-source cloud-based smartphone app
Here's a 2 year old post on reddit bringing up the same concerns:
https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/10g6fgv/prusa_giving_up_on_its_open_source_roots/
It's certainly possible. They are pretty explicit on it though, at least.
"For some products, we do not release the full PCB manufacturing layouts, as we do not want to support manufacturing of untested clone boards. "
https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_236812/
Found the blog post that I was thinking of, with a little more about Prusa's relation with opene source. https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-printing-in-2023_76659/
I mean, you either can afford Prusa or you can't. A Chinese fake Prusa knockoff is in no way interesting to people who want and expect the Prusa quality (though I haven't had much luck with the fabled quality myself, the printer needed fixing multiple times). And people who can't afford a Prusa are not a potential customer anyway. So cheap knockoffs are not stealing any customers.
Bambu is who's stealing Prusa's customers en masse and Prusa decided that they're gonna slowly lock down their ecosystem while benefiting from years of open source by other people and projects. Which is, ironically enough, their stated reason for locking their ecosystem - people benefiting from their open source work while being closed.
The most common reasons to buy Prusa that I have heard are their 24/7 support, warranty and wanting to support a European company. I'm not entirely up to date with Chinese manufacturers, so things could have changed, but at least in the past Fysetc, Blurolls and even Trianglelab seemed to be on par, or even exceeding, Prusa quality for printers and parts.