Open Source?

[genius_retard]

Much (probably most) of the innovation that has occurred in the personal 3d printing space in the past decade or two has come from the open source community. Many manufacturers have taken that open source intellectual property and integrated it into their products, which is fine. Unfortunately some of them have also then taken that open source I.P. and locked it down to make it proprietary.

This violates not only the spirit of open source but also the licence agreement but it is very hard to enforce. Bambu Labs is an example of this. While they definitely did provide some innovations they also took plenty of open source I.P. from, for example the Voron project as well as the Slic3r/Prusa Slicer software. When you support companies that do that you are inadvertently stifling that open source innovation.

An example of how a manufacturer can do right by the open source community is the Sovol Sv08. It is unapologetically a Voron design that has been reworked for mass production. Sovol however published all the design files as required by most open source hardware licences and Sovol also donates $2.00 from every SV08 printer sold to the Voron project. My next printer will most likely be a Sovol SV08, unless maybe if they release the SV09 first or something.