MakerBot Going Closed Source? 182
An anonymous reader writes "A year after a windfall $10 million in venture capital, and after a community stir over one man's attempt to Kickstarter a project to manufacture the open source Replicator with a lower price tag, it appears that MakerBot Industries is going closed source on their new model 3d printer, the Replicator 2. Josef Prusa, core developer of the widely known RepRap printer (the basis for previous MakerBot models) has confirmed the sad news, with a stunned tweet, and is organizing an 'Occupy Thingiverse,' to protest the apparent theft of others' work."
No surprise (Score:2, Informative)
I tried contributing to a FOSS game - there I found out there are ten times as many leechers looking to appropriate code (w/o citation) than there are talented people willing to write it. Then they started discussing commercial licensing and i called it quits.
Re:Hypocrites (Score:4, Informative)
Giving to a Kickstarter is a donation. They are under no obligation to do anything for you and any promises of rewards or timelines are not enforceable. So many people are not realizing this and as KS gets more popular it's going to cause big problems. OUYA got $9 million and they could bleed the money out over the next 2-3 years (good luck expecting to see anything in 04-2013) and walk away giving nothing back.
tl;dr
If you gave KS money don't expect a refund because they didn't meet their goal.
Re:time to fork the project (Score:4, Informative)
OpenOffice in the hands of Sun/Oracle was a very close development community, not close source, but extremely closed to accept contributions
Re:time to fork the project (Score:4, Informative)
Ever hear of StarOffice? It was a proprietary, free-as-in-free-beer office suite in the late 90s that was acquired by Sun. Sun opened the source around 2001, which became OO v1. It continued to release proprietary versions of OO as "StarOffice" until it was acquired by Oracle, which released a single version rebranded as "Oracle Open Office" in 2010 then promptly axed the project.
webcast fail (Score:5, Informative)
their webcast was really badly done in regards of it's audience.
95% of people watching it were people who already had 3d printers, some makerbots, some repraps and so on. the speech was aimed at people who didn't weren't familiar with makerbot.
yet, they acted as if makerbot exists in a vacuum(no mention of reprap, of the things used to print parts for the first mbi devices or any previous models from them even). the new model is more expensive too - and support is extra cost(!) despite it being more expensive than the last model. it also does less(no abs support on the model that's coming to sale this year, it only supports the pla plastic). it was hype, hype and more hype.
there was _no_ technical discussion about the device on the announcement, if the electronics and such are the same as previous replicator or not(they claim the new one does 0.1mm layers, but the old one did too). they didn't even tell if the new sw stack works with the old replicator(it does, didn't have time yesterday for test prints though). there was no discussion of if they have some newer extruder technology or innovations(they don't seem to, electronics don't seem to have changed either).
the new model seems to be aimed at taking market from cubify and other closed system 3d printers, but it costs more than their older model.
the new sw is _mostly_ open source too though - since it's just the UI that's new and what it does is tie together open source components. it offers less flexible configuration options than the (buggy) replicatorg sw though when it comes to preparing the print. the 3d viewer is prettier though.
the countdown was on for so long that people were expecting a rostock style printer or at least something significantly different and certainly cheaper(usually you would do that, design something cheaper if you don't add features), certainly not them turning away from open to "prosumer" version of their existing device at a higher pricepoint, replicator1 was already expensive enough. if it's their time to start churning profit(and they weren't with the old pricing?) then it doesn't bode too well for them.
Re:time to fork the project (Score:4, Informative)
Although there was some truth to this, much of this is mythological these days. I save to doc and docx with LO, and no one has been the wiser. Admittedly, they're not highly formatted with lots of font changes and document template disciplining. Nonetheless, no one has been the wiser for at least a couple of years now.
Wholesale changeover? No. I'm not even expecting that. I've also used MS Office on Apple.. but never used iWork apps as they weren't known for document interchangeability with the Office hegemony. Perhaps they were; if so, I was unaware.
Re:time to fork the project (Score:5, Informative)
>But I think they were saying OpenOffice vs StarOffice.
I would guess he meant exactly what he said: LibreOffice vs OpenOffice
Oracle was being a complete jackass about OO.o, so most all the contributors abandoned it and formed LO. After that, Oracle realized there was no point to holding on to it, so they donated OO.o to Apache. It lives on there, but is moving at a glacial pace compared to LO.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:4, Informative)
I think the issue is they presented it as one thing initially to garner support and monetary donations then now that they have that are changing it to be more beneficial to them directly.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
Have you ever had intellectual property stolen before, and talked to a lawyer about it? Unless you've got really deep pockets, you can't afford it. Because you're a small guy — not even in the country in this case — and they're well-capitalized by guys with very deep pockets who can afford the sort of well-connected lawyer who bills at $500 an hour and up. It doesn't matter how thoroughly you can document the whole thing, or that what you developed is absolutely essential to what the thief is selling. Unless you've got at least 10s of 1000s of dollars to speculate on the outcome in court, you can't even get into court with good enough representation to prevail.
Depending on the courts as first line of defense is impractical. The courts belong to the big players, not the common folk. Especially in New York — where I once watch the opposing attorney openly, in court session, bribe the judge for a favorable outcome. Community opinion is sometimes the only defense we've got, especially if we can use the press to force thieves back into something like compliance with GPL licensing and the spirit of the movement.
Re:time to fork the project (Score:4, Informative)
The interesting difference here is the barrier to entry: The Replicator 2 is a physical object. It needs a supply chain, and shipping arrangements, and a manufacturing base to fork it. (Instead of in pure software where the only thing besides the people you need is some web hosting.) So, it'll take others quite some time to set up a fork of reasonable size and quality, and a fair amount of money.
Should be interesting to watch the fallout of this.
you mean like this :)
http://www.mbot3d.com/ [mbot3d.com]
?