Of course they are. It's been lies and flim flam for a while. Worst printers on the market, just look at the reviews. They had US manufacturing going for them, but I guess even that much of their previous reputation, honor, and pride was too much to hold on to.
I'm looking too and based on reviews I read, I'd agree with LastZactionHero.
We have three MakerBots at my company and at least the two Replicator 2X have been fraught with problems. Service from MakerBot was terrible so in the end we had to repair it ourselves as best we could. Based just on that experience, I'd recommend against them.
I can't comment on "the best" but I know enough that a printer can be had for roughly half the price of a makerbot that will achieve better results. The "fifth generation" makerbot doesn't have a heated bed, can't print ABS...
I've been researching that for a couple of weeks, trying to find the right (pre-assembled) printer. Frankly, there's not a ton of difference in specs.
I wound up having to make my decision on 1) price, 2) what I felt I could look at for a while, considering the cost, and 3) whether or not it seemed like a company that would survive a while.
Prices for the same level of capability between brands vary wildly - there are printers out there that perform on paper just as well as a Makerbot and cost easily half as much. It's almost like they just tote up the cost of mfg and then make up a number to add to it.
Wound up buying a Cel-Robox for $1200 ($1600 after supplies and tax, etc.). We'll see how this turns out.
We really should try to promote 3D printing companies that support the open source movement and local manufacturing. Maybe we should set up a wikipedia category for open source 3d printers?
Product Chart has a section for 3d printers with open source design:
They tried. And the result is that as they got press and notoriety people took their open plans and made replicas in China and sold them at a cost that massively undercut MB.
If they had stayed open source they would have gone under years ago, probably years before Systrays bought them.
Open hardware doesn't really seem to be a sustainable business, at least not when what you're making costs as much as a 3D printer. A brand name isn't worth a ton when an identical rip-off product is 40% cheaper and performs the same.
Open source software is a sustainable business in that you use it to foster a consulting business. Write something that fills a commercial need but is complex to configure, open source it, and then sell tech support to the users that tried to set up your system, sunk costs into it, then realised they were out of their depth.
Open hardware works similarly in that you offer your design and then sell a reference build of it. There will always be some percentage of users who are attracted by the fact that it's 'free' but just want the finished product and don't care about building it themselves.
It's a viable business model, it just doesn't scale the way closed-source scales. It only works when you're selling something new that hasn't been mega-mass-produced and commoditised yet. If you want to design something once then churn out millions of units, don't open-source your design.
Other than a handful of minor endcap parts, everything is made in China: the control board, stepper motor, extruder, heat bed, wires, limit switches, lead screws, bearings, guide rods, filament, fasteners, cables and probably the laser-cut lexan or aluminum folded frame.
So, the jobs that leave the US go to China, but maybe the company can increase sales/invest more because they have better economics, and then grow, and then hire more people. Its only a net loss in the short term, not necessarily forever.
The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware.
Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods community adoption.
The price paid for Makerbot was handsome, but as everyone was doing OK already - this was perceived as 'selling out' and the goodwill began evaporating. The question then for Makerbot is: Does the momentum of being first to market trump the anger among the maker community & alpha adopters ?
When I bought Minecraft at alpha, Mojang suggested it would become open - then after making more cash than anyone needs they sold it to Microsoft. I felt a bit betrayed, not because of $20 but because I promoted it and gave it to friends children and now they are tied into Microsoft which was the opposite of my intention.
This problem echoes down the ages: traditionally bands sell out the truefans when they sign with the majors; the closing of the UNIX community when Bell was privatised; the emerging idea that cool hacks, hardware & software shouldn't be shared among friends, exemplified by Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club about BASIC.
This makes new communities wonder if there is a way to prevent this - Stallman invented the GPL to stop the 'tradgedy of the commons' happening to his work & community.
Is there a community GPL that could have been used for MakerBot to ensure it stayed community orientated ?
Does this reflect the difference between Free and Open ? GPL & MIT, is this the tragedy of the commons that only the GPL ensures against ?
In a number of ways this echoes the early microcomputer industry (thinking the 1970s-80s), when dozens of competing and incompatible standards existed. Atari, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, just to name a few. And as the industry neared middle age in the 1990s, shopping for a "PC Clone" was a cornucopia of options: a copy of PC Shopper was hundreds of pages thick, each with ads for "custom made" PC clones "built to your specifications". Lead times of weeks, hundreds of case, motherboards, CPU, RAM and Video card options existed... and prices were in the $2000+. Now it's settled down to a few big players who essentially sell poorly-differentiated commodity items for paper-thin margins. It is to be expected as an industry matures.
A company must choose where to place itself. Go after the high-end boutique market and risk pricing yourself out (if one can't communicate the price/value argument to customers), or become another "me too" supplier in a race to the bottom, following all the same steps as the competition, facing extinction due to lack of margin.
Mature free markets that entail paper thin margins are naturally disrupted and conquered.
Jobs had seen Kay's Dynabook at Parc and had some vision of what portable computers could offer. Apple phones made $250 per phone, even with less than 0.5% of the market Jobs had already won as Nokia et al. made ~pence per phone.
Cartels and Monopolies naturally aggregate to protect incumbents from the needs & desires of the customer and society from the painful costs of over rapid progress, yet like great empires companies decline when their owners lose touch with their daily customers needs, demands or desires.
Intellectual property rights are not natural rights but a social contract, providing temporary monopoly in exchange for social benefit.
GPL doesn't even protect against this kind of situation. The copyright holder is not bound by the GPL license, they are the one licensing it. Anything release under the GPL is still available as GPL, but the copyright holder has no obligation to release future changes under the GPL. They can instead have a proprietary license. Things can get a little more muddied with community contributions as the contributor owns the copyright to the change, unless they sign over the copyright as part of a contributor agreement.
Extrusion 3D printers derive from the research of the RepRap project, by Bowyer of Bath University, it is GPL.
The MakerBot derives from this GPLed work - the first MakerBot parts were printed by a RepRap.
This is a RepRap tradition that a RepRap print the parts for new RepRaps, a ceremonial self replication.
So the MakerBot's intellectual property is not wholly their own and in fact is derives from a GPL licensed work.
Is this a GPL violation or did MakerBot relicense the RepRap from Bath ?
Perhaps the MakerBot is a 'clean room' redesign of the RepRap, but Pettis, MakerBot's founder was involved from the beginning and built RepRaps and the the MakerBot designs evolution (and initial part printing) from the RepRap is well documented by Make magazine.
MakerBots not being GPL licensed seems like a GPL violation but IANAL.
Thanks for the follow-up, it is interesting to see how/ or not the GPL works in areas other than code.
So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ?
Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing way of doing the nozzle or special hot-plate method to avoid warping ) would this demonstrate a derived work and trigger GPL ?
If this type of thing isn't a GPL trigger then why can't anyone clean room a different design of sintering tech and allow general sinter 3D printing and sales ?
Is this difference because the GPL relies on copyright but 3D sintering is patent protected ? If so does Open Hardware need a GPL patent license, can that even be possible ?
Yep. Clean room reverse engineering also steers clear of copyright, and hardware design cases are very difficult to prove unless it's a direct knockoff -- if copyright worked that way, then things like 3rd party auto parts manufacturing couldn't exist either.
3d sintering is different because as you said, sintering is patented. Physical products have a bunch of rules that are significantly different from software products, and the area is really murky. I don't know of any GPL hardware cases, but would doubt they'd get very far unless you were able to show direct infringement, which is a lot harder.
If the provided description is perfect enough to produce a identical copy, then I doubt a court would care much if the "copying" is done verbally or through a computer. Clean room reimplementation only really work if you are operating on public material that is used as reference, and the copy comes out identical because of the natural result from implementing it.
So OK, given that generality, is there any reason to suspect that parts of the Makerbot derive from GPLed community innovations and thus in violation ?
Or I am off base and Bowyer's RepRap GPL only applies to media like blueprints ?
Or the Makerbot is sufficiently different ? Or there was prior art to Bowyer ?
Totally understand being disappointed in MakerBot for a myriad of other reasons. But the whole, "omg stuff is going to be shitty because its Chinese" is a tired old trope. If you know what you are doing and aren't needlessly cutting corners you should be fine.
P.S: Not Chinese, I've just enjoyed enough Chinese mfg'd (even Chinese designed) products now to know that trope is old.
I've gotten about half my wardrobe from AliExpress, and I look like a million bucks.
The stigma is for the uneducated. Cheap knockoffs will be cheap. But if you know how to spend and where to spend it in China — regardless of industry — you will get amazing quality for the price.
Sort by "hottest"! Just read the reviews and pay attention to ratings. Read a lot of reviews them. Triple-check sizing. If you don't know, then send a message to the shop and ask. They're really friendly and great.
It might be worth going to a local tailor and getting measured. They'll gladly do it for free, but I'll usually give the person $20 as a thank you.
Regarding scores: I won't buy if the "Item as Described" metric is below 4.6. I can usually get stuff to Minnesota within 10 days via ePacket.
Agreed. I got a whole bunch of tailored business attire for literally 10% of the European cost while on holiday in China. The quality is amazing, and the style is copied from the latest designs, just no label is applied so no infringement. I've never been able to afford tailored clothing before.
A lot of people wonder why large companies can't just stay in the US and compete on quality, and here is a great case for why. It doesn't matter how great your workers are, you can't sell a product for $3,000 when others are selling it for $600. Especially when it's a technology still in development.
And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home tinkerer in Indianapolis doesn't get super warm and fuzzy thinking of paying an extra $2000 just to support some exorbitant Brooklyn rent.
I often wonder if costs could be lowered for many of these companies if they would stop locating in some of the country's most expensive places to operate and for their employees to live. I know the arguments about workforce availability and all that, but I've never seen a proper look into it.
Yeah. MakerBot could easily move to Indianapolis, after all. Or even less expensive locations elsewhere in Indiana, for that matter. Brooklyn is one of the most expensive markets in the United States, yet Indiana has just as many qualified technical people. Perhaps more, to be honest. Purdue is a pretty fantastic engineering school.
Probably could make the same case for Detroit, get access to UofM students, plenty of large warehouse space, long history of manufacturing, dirt cheap houses, and of course... exiles that were priced out of Brooklyn.
The challenge is still that you can build ANYTHING in China and if you can get the same quality and lower prices significantly, why would you choose a middle of the road solution in the US? I think the cost differential still overrides any sort of boost you might have from having a Made in the USA stamp on the machine.
I'm pretty convinced that you can get any quality you're willing to specify, pay for, and inspect for in China.
Where's your iPhone made?
China gets a bad rap for the lowest, barely passable spec crap that gets made and sold by vendors seeking the lowest possible COGS. It's not that China can't make iPhones; it's that they get asked to make cheap shit in a lot of cases. And they can happily do that, too...
Sure, but there's the rub - how many iphones get made in a year? Your volume has to be stupid big to make high quality chinese manufacturing make sense.
It still wouldn't help. It's cheaper to manufacture electronics in China even if the labor costs are the same. The logistics are vastly better over there. If you need PCBs or components, you can have them direct from the factory on the same day. If you have a production problem, you can get a specialist engineer the same day. If you need a new production line with 200 extra staff, you can have it up and running in two weeks.
An established EMS company like Jabil has huge economies of scale and tremendous in-house resources. They have long relationships with suppliers and consultants. A startup can't possibly compete with that.
Yea I've spent tons of time in China, and worked with a number of these ODM type companies and smaller factories, and the kinds of things they can get done in short times for small amounts of money is pretty amazing.. Basically why its so hard not to manufacture in china is because of the "factory engineering plus" kind of model. Basically you get low cost engineering work done by the factory to modify your plastic tool, tweak your PCB design, build test fixtures, setup test station software, etc.. Basically one person who knows what they are doing can essentially give a detailed list of instructions to a factory in china and they will just "make it happen" for a really good price.. Since there are so few factories in the US anymore, there are no engineers that work for the factories, so there are very few companies that offer engineering work for low cost, whereas in China the actual factory work pays for the salaries of the engineers. So, its hard to compete with that..
Makerbot Studio is in Industry City, where rent isn't exactly "expensive".[0]
Rent (for employees) is also very accessible in the nearby area, nothing close to Manhattan or some swanky neighborhood in BK. (I live nearby)
In my opinion, especially in technology, its just hard to operate at scale and not produce products in China. Not only is their labor force less expensive but the parts that you require are manufactured there as well.
I saw a posh house in Florida a few months ago for $700 a month. The whole house and yard space. 20 minutes from Miami. Weeks later I saw a one for $550 in North Carolina.
Well if you living in the expat areas yes.
Hong Kong would be more expensive than Manhattan and central London combined if you want to live in the western areas also.
I've always been off-put by American Apparel's "Made in Downtown Los Angeles". Like I'm supposed to be impressed by it. For Middle America, it might as well say "Made in Downtown Dubai".
You don't have to locate in some of the country's most expensive places to operate, but you'll still be located in one of the world's most expensive countries to operate.
Honestly I dont see why and how Americans can do lot of those jobs. (de facto) Minimum wage in USA is around $10. You can hire an Indian or Chinese for an entire day for that amount and he will thank you.
The fact is that average productivity of an average American is so high today that it does not make sense anymore for most Americans to do a lot of those jobs.
This makes life difficult for some people at the bottom who have no skill and I think as a society we need to solve that problem. But I see government regulation and unreasonably high taxation as primary barriers to do anything.
Probably. But then there is shipping. If I may stray a bit. The price to ship a small package from Adafruit to a place less than 10 miles cost me around $10.00 - 4 days tops. I can make a similar purchase for a Chinese spoofed version and have it in 7 days, free shipping. I don't know how the heck the shipping from China is so cheap. While to ship anything inside the us is frigging expensive...to ship outside the us is worse. And we invented modern day shipping.
Slightly off-topic, but that's the real problem. How the hell are we (West) going to compete with China if shipping a small item in the same city, for example where I live now, cost 2-3 €, meanwhile the same item from China cost less and shipping fee to my door is 0! Ordering inside EU is even worse, it's common that shipping costs more than the item itself. Sure, it takes a while for order to arrive from China, but if I'm not in a rush, I don't mind that. I order a lot of mundane things from eBay/Aliexpress just because: a) no/small shipping fee b) it's faster and easier than to look for alternatives in physical shops. Postal system is what really needs an overhaul imho.
There's a great amount of manufacturing in the US. In fact, the US is the world's second largest manfacturer.
The reality is you can't open a manufacturing shop in a hip and gentrified urban neighborhood for "cool points" and expect to keep costs down. You want factories in poorer rural areas, not a place where the media home sale price is close to $700,000.
The China or bust mentality serves big business, but the reality is that you can do domestic manufacturing at a decent cost if you desired it.
Houston's not as cheap as it used to be. Right now if you want to get parts made it's totally doable. But two years ago when oil was at $100/bbl? I couldn't get anyone to return a call, ever! The company I worked for had to start its own machine shop to get anything done.
Housing was cheap in '09 but the average apartment rent was $1700 in November '15. That's over a year since the oil price crashed.
If oil prices continue to stay low for another year or two Houston might get more affordable as people leave looking for work elsewhere. But that's a big "if" and it's barely started.
I'm pretty sure the Indianapolis tinkerer might be happy to pay $~1000 for a 3D printer made in Goshen, Indiana though.
I know it's harder to find talent in small-towns, but in today's economy, you can do a lot with just a small group of people and a workshop in the middle of the country.
I think this is the inflection point when the 3D printers went from "local" maker fare to corporate without regard for their users. It's like having a local grass fed product suddenly strike a deal with Whole Foods and expands productions all over the place and are no longer local --they move production to increase capacity but may lose on the localness.
At least it feels that way. It's not the same feeling as if production of cheap sunglasses gets off-shored.
Understandable as to why they're doing this, but the amount of spin in how they titled their press release is sickening. "Production flexibility," indeed.
MakerBot sucked at manufacturing. Laser-cut wood frames for a production product? Please. What they need from China is manufacturing expertise. People who can design injection molds and stamping dies. They were in love with their "replicator" fantasy of one-off manufacturing, forgetting that 3D printing costs orders of magnitude more than injection molding in quantity, and produces inferior plastic.
Makerbot is in a tough spot. They lost points with people when they announced closing off of some of their work vs remaining open source. And so customers thought they might (if they are paying premium for consumer level printing anyway) to go with Ultimaker which retained premium build quality and remained open. And month after month, other companies keep bringing printers out to compete.
Microcenter is carrying Makerbot but also much lower priced generic 3D printers I think which are house branded. Dremel has a very nice 3D printer for a lot less than Makerbot and apparently has pretty good tech support too.
In regards to competing with China though, it's important to know that the products from China are artificially low and that seems to benefit us but it also means that so many of us are out of work or under employed. But if you straighten out trade balance and currency manipulation Chinese products become more expensive as they naturally should be, local U.S. goods become more accessible and less expensive to a degree and and we have more people with more buying power (because employment) to make the economy work.
The Dremel is a rebranded Flashforge Dreamer if I'm not mistaken. At home I have a Flashforge Creator Pro (a clone of a Replicator 2X, but with a lot of improvements) and I'm really happy with it.
It is more than (in Europe) half the price of a Makerbot and that for a printer that is certainly on par with it or maybe be even better. It scores very high in the enthousiasts category on 3D hubs (https://www.3dhubs.com/3d-printers#enthusiast)
Regarding Chinese quality, I don't have the feeling that "Made in USA" is so much better if I see how many problems there are with the Makerbot Replicator 5th generation imo. That version is notorious for having a lot of quality problems.
These days most parts come from Chinese manufacturers anyway... .
The Mendelmax 3 & Fusematic from Makers Tool Works are built in the USA and sourced from US suppliers. The guy behind it has done more for the RepRap mechanical bits, aside from Joeseph Prusa.
The Lulzbot mentioned below was based on the Mendelmax 1.5. This line of printers moved RepRap from a threaded rod construction to extruded aluminum. Also the first to have linear rails instead of steel rod+linear bearings. The new Mendelmax3 is a mix of laser cut parts and extrusions - and has required less service than any of my printers to date.
If Middle America wants those jobs, Middle Americans are welcome to start a fashion label of their own. But since they seem to thrive on blandness in the Midwest I doubt that's going to happen.
I understand the tone may be a little off putting but that is very true. The culture of much of middle America shames dreamers and free thinkers as opposed to working long hours and maximizing profit.
That culture is causing a serious brain drain and more importantly a hard ceiling on how far a brand can reach into the unknown. Its the difference between capturing the imaginations of consumers all over the world as opposed to simply trying to scale into some generic chain store or big box retail product.
Amazing that it costs less to manufacture and package something, then ship it thousands of miles on a boat, unload it and it's way cheaper than making the same product in the USA.
Kindof makes you think there's something else going on. Currency? Regulation? Global forces?
My crazy conspiracy theory is that Makerbot was acquired by Stratasys as a ploy to buy out the most dangerous and high quality big hobbyist 3D printer brand and then torpedo it with value engineering to allow them to sell their own in house brand (uPrint) better. Maybe that's not true, but the Gen 5 Replicator was Day 0 garbage.
My Replicator Gen 5 was not functional on launch, I never got a good print out of it. The self calibration function was non-functional out of the box after one print, and the inability to manually level was designed out from the Rep2, a design so good, international manufacturers copied it in the form of the Flashforge. The Rep 5 was completely redesigned for no reason, the integral filament reel was intended to bully you into buying Makerbot brand filament on their custom reels, the "new" software made it so you could CHANGE LESS SETTINGS, like you know, temperature, or feed rate. Basically Gen 5 was a corporate ball of dark patterns and poor regressive design, completely overpriced, and shipped before it was ready to boot. One could argue that making the Makerbot brand a more closed design was a choice of positioning, but I feel that is only justified if you can deliver the ease of use value, which Gen 5 didn't.
Sadly, those Brooklynite's jobs might have been doomed when the Stratasys logo first went up on the Makerbot sign.
There are some comments here about the difficulty competing with Chinese knockoffs, but there are many small companies making high quality 3D printers, and they have good reputations: Ultimaker. Printrbot. E3D BigBox. Makergear. There are probably many others too that have been around for years but I'm not really plugged in.
Thomas Sanladerer on youtube is a good source of information, and reprap.org, if you're shopping.
Moving to China means more communication effort and more coordination which can really hurt your business if you do it bad upfront. Same reason why enterprise usually hires consultants rather than hiring everyone as full-time under their paycheck even though the enterprise itself has to pay more money to the consulting company: enterprise doesn't need to pay for health benefit, bonus and even travel expense; pay a premium for a package. Of course, a smart enterprise talent management should turn consultants into full time over time if when the consultants are critical for the growth of a given project...
111 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadI'd recommend Lulzbot and Ultimaker.
We have three MakerBots at my company and at least the two Replicator 2X have been fraught with problems. Service from MakerBot was terrible so in the end we had to repair it ourselves as best we could. Based just on that experience, I'd recommend against them.
I wound up having to make my decision on 1) price, 2) what I felt I could look at for a while, considering the cost, and 3) whether or not it seemed like a company that would survive a while.
Prices for the same level of capability between brands vary wildly - there are printers out there that perform on paper just as well as a Makerbot and cost easily half as much. It's almost like they just tote up the cost of mfg and then make up a number to add to it.
Wound up buying a Cel-Robox for $1200 ($1600 after supplies and tax, etc.). We'll see how this turns out.
I might be swimming in filament for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakerBot_Industries#Closed_sou...
Product Chart has a section for 3d printers with open source design:
http://www.productchart.com/3d_printers/sets/4
If they had stayed open source they would have gone under years ago, probably years before Systrays bought them.
Open hardware doesn't really seem to be a sustainable business, at least not when what you're making costs as much as a 3D printer. A brand name isn't worth a ton when an identical rip-off product is 40% cheaper and performs the same.
Neither does open source software tbh.
Open hardware works similarly in that you offer your design and then sell a reference build of it. There will always be some percentage of users who are attracted by the fact that it's 'free' but just want the finished product and don't care about building it themselves.
It's a viable business model, it just doesn't scale the way closed-source scales. It only works when you're selling something new that hasn't been mega-mass-produced and commoditised yet. If you want to design something once then churn out millions of units, don't open-source your design.
The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware.
Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods community adoption.
The price paid for Makerbot was handsome, but as everyone was doing OK already - this was perceived as 'selling out' and the goodwill began evaporating. The question then for Makerbot is: Does the momentum of being first to market trump the anger among the maker community & alpha adopters ?
When I bought Minecraft at alpha, Mojang suggested it would become open - then after making more cash than anyone needs they sold it to Microsoft. I felt a bit betrayed, not because of $20 but because I promoted it and gave it to friends children and now they are tied into Microsoft which was the opposite of my intention.
This problem echoes down the ages: traditionally bands sell out the truefans when they sign with the majors; the closing of the UNIX community when Bell was privatised; the emerging idea that cool hacks, hardware & software shouldn't be shared among friends, exemplified by Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club about BASIC.
This makes new communities wonder if there is a way to prevent this - Stallman invented the GPL to stop the 'tradgedy of the commons' happening to his work & community.
Is there a community GPL that could have been used for MakerBot to ensure it stayed community orientated ?
Does this reflect the difference between Free and Open ? GPL & MIT, is this the tragedy of the commons that only the GPL ensures against ?
A company must choose where to place itself. Go after the high-end boutique market and risk pricing yourself out (if one can't communicate the price/value argument to customers), or become another "me too" supplier in a race to the bottom, following all the same steps as the competition, facing extinction due to lack of margin.
Jobs had seen Kay's Dynabook at Parc and had some vision of what portable computers could offer. Apple phones made $250 per phone, even with less than 0.5% of the market Jobs had already won as Nokia et al. made ~pence per phone.
Cartels and Monopolies naturally aggregate to protect incumbents from the needs & desires of the customer and society from the painful costs of over rapid progress, yet like great empires companies decline when their owners lose touch with their daily customers needs, demands or desires.
Intellectual property rights are not natural rights but a social contract, providing temporary monopoly in exchange for social benefit.
Rinse and repeat.
The MakerBot derives from this GPLed work - the first MakerBot parts were printed by a RepRap.
This is a RepRap tradition that a RepRap print the parts for new RepRaps, a ceremonial self replication.
So the MakerBot's intellectual property is not wholly their own and in fact is derives from a GPL licensed work.
Is this a GPL violation or did MakerBot relicense the RepRap from Bath ?
Perhaps the MakerBot is a 'clean room' redesign of the RepRap, but Pettis, MakerBot's founder was involved from the beginning and built RepRaps and the the MakerBot designs evolution (and initial part printing) from the RepRap is well documented by Make magazine.
MakerBots not being GPL licensed seems like a GPL violation but IANAL.
So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ?
Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing way of doing the nozzle or special hot-plate method to avoid warping ) would this demonstrate a derived work and trigger GPL ?
If this type of thing isn't a GPL trigger then why can't anyone clean room a different design of sintering tech and allow general sinter 3D printing and sales ?
Is this difference because the GPL relies on copyright but 3D sintering is patent protected ? If so does Open Hardware need a GPL patent license, can that even be possible ?
Has a hardware GPL case ever been brought ?
3d sintering is different because as you said, sintering is patented. Physical products have a bunch of rules that are significantly different from software products, and the area is really murky. I don't know of any GPL hardware cases, but would doubt they'd get very far unless you were able to show direct infringement, which is a lot harder.
Or I am off base and Bowyer's RepRap GPL only applies to media like blueprints ?
Or the Makerbot is sufficiently different ? Or there was prior art to Bowyer ?
P.S: Not Chinese, I've just enjoyed enough Chinese mfg'd (even Chinese designed) products now to know that trope is old.
The stigma is for the uneducated. Cheap knockoffs will be cheap. But if you know how to spend and where to spend it in China — regardless of industry — you will get amazing quality for the price.
It might be worth going to a local tailor and getting measured. They'll gladly do it for free, but I'll usually give the person $20 as a thank you.
Regarding scores: I won't buy if the "Item as Described" metric is below 4.6. I can usually get stuff to Minnesota within 10 days via ePacket.
And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home tinkerer in Indianapolis doesn't get super warm and fuzzy thinking of paying an extra $2000 just to support some exorbitant Brooklyn rent.
Point being you could find much better locations than Brooklyn without going straight to China (while keeping your own self in Coolsville).
That's a pretty big if. But truth be told, most things don't need to be ultra-high-quality with ultra-tight tolerances.
Where's your iPhone made?
China gets a bad rap for the lowest, barely passable spec crap that gets made and sold by vendors seeking the lowest possible COGS. It's not that China can't make iPhones; it's that they get asked to make cheap shit in a lot of cases. And they can happily do that, too...
An established EMS company like Jabil has huge economies of scale and tremendous in-house resources. They have long relationships with suppliers and consultants. A startup can't possibly compete with that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11568699
Perhaps it's worth the effort to have some manufacturing and expertise in the US?
So what you're proposing, yeah pretty much doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
Rent (for employees) is also very accessible in the nearby area, nothing close to Manhattan or some swanky neighborhood in BK. (I live nearby)
In my opinion, especially in technology, its just hard to operate at scale and not produce products in China. Not only is their labor force less expensive but the parts that you require are manufactured there as well.
[0] : https://commercialobserver.com/2015/09/brooklyns-sunset-park...
Coastals might feign confusion, but that spoke to lots of folks.
The fact is that average productivity of an average American is so high today that it does not make sense anymore for most Americans to do a lot of those jobs.
This makes life difficult for some people at the bottom who have no skill and I think as a society we need to solve that problem. But I see government regulation and unreasonably high taxation as primary barriers to do anything.
"The Postal Service is losing millions a year to help you buy cheap stuff from China" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...
The reality is you can't open a manufacturing shop in a hip and gentrified urban neighborhood for "cool points" and expect to keep costs down. You want factories in poorer rural areas, not a place where the media home sale price is close to $700,000.
The China or bust mentality serves big business, but the reality is that you can do domestic manufacturing at a decent cost if you desired it.
Housing was cheap in '09 but the average apartment rent was $1700 in November '15. That's over a year since the oil price crashed.
If oil prices continue to stay low for another year or two Houston might get more affordable as people leave looking for work elsewhere. But that's a big "if" and it's barely started.
I know it's harder to find talent in small-towns, but in today's economy, you can do a lot with just a small group of people and a workshop in the middle of the country.
At least it feels that way. It's not the same feeling as if production of cheap sunglasses gets off-shored.
The way I see it, they simply want to lower production costs, cut jobs, save money. Stratasys overpaid heavily.
Microcenter is carrying Makerbot but also much lower priced generic 3D printers I think which are house branded. Dremel has a very nice 3D printer for a lot less than Makerbot and apparently has pretty good tech support too.
In regards to competing with China though, it's important to know that the products from China are artificially low and that seems to benefit us but it also means that so many of us are out of work or under employed. But if you straighten out trade balance and currency manipulation Chinese products become more expensive as they naturally should be, local U.S. goods become more accessible and less expensive to a degree and and we have more people with more buying power (because employment) to make the economy work.
It is more than (in Europe) half the price of a Makerbot and that for a printer that is certainly on par with it or maybe be even better. It scores very high in the enthousiasts category on 3D hubs (https://www.3dhubs.com/3d-printers#enthusiast)
Regarding Chinese quality, I don't have the feeling that "Made in USA" is so much better if I see how many problems there are with the Makerbot Replicator 5th generation imo. That version is notorious for having a lot of quality problems.
These days most parts come from Chinese manufacturers anyway... .
Can you explain China's currency manipulation? I don't get how this is different from the Fed printing money. Every country does it to an extent.
The Lulzbot mentioned below was based on the Mendelmax 1.5. This line of printers moved RepRap from a threaded rod construction to extruded aluminum. Also the first to have linear rails instead of steel rod+linear bearings. The new Mendelmax3 is a mix of laser cut parts and extrusions - and has required less service than any of my printers to date.
That culture is causing a serious brain drain and more importantly a hard ceiling on how far a brand can reach into the unknown. Its the difference between capturing the imaginations of consumers all over the world as opposed to simply trying to scale into some generic chain store or big box retail product.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11574854 and marked it off-topic.
Kindof makes you think there's something else going on. Currency? Regulation? Global forces?
My Replicator Gen 5 was not functional on launch, I never got a good print out of it. The self calibration function was non-functional out of the box after one print, and the inability to manually level was designed out from the Rep2, a design so good, international manufacturers copied it in the form of the Flashforge. The Rep 5 was completely redesigned for no reason, the integral filament reel was intended to bully you into buying Makerbot brand filament on their custom reels, the "new" software made it so you could CHANGE LESS SETTINGS, like you know, temperature, or feed rate. Basically Gen 5 was a corporate ball of dark patterns and poor regressive design, completely overpriced, and shipped before it was ready to boot. One could argue that making the Makerbot brand a more closed design was a choice of positioning, but I feel that is only justified if you can deliver the ease of use value, which Gen 5 didn't.
Sadly, those Brooklynite's jobs might have been doomed when the Stratasys logo first went up on the Makerbot sign.
Thomas Sanladerer on youtube is a good source of information, and reprap.org, if you're shopping.