https://hackaday.com/2024/11/20/with-core-one-prusas-open-source-hardware-dream-quietly-dies/ Skip to content Logo Hackaday Primary Menu * Home * Blog * Hackaday.io * Tindie * Hackaday Prize * Submit * About * Search for: [ ] [Search] November 20, 2024 With Core ONE, Prusa's Open Source Hardware Dream Quietly Dies 24 Comments * by: Tom Nardi November 20, 2024 * * * * * Title: [With Core ONE, Prusa] Copy Short Link: [https://hackaday.com] Copy [coreone_fe] Yesterday, Prusa Research officially unveiled their next printer, the Core ONE. Going over the features and capabilities of this new machine, it's clear that Prusa has kept a close eye on the rapidly changing desktop 3D printer market and designed a machine to better position themselves within a field of increasingly capable machines from other manufacturers. While some saw the incremental upgrades of the i3 MK4 as being too conservative, the Core ONE ticks all the boxes of what today's consumer is looking for -- namely high-speed CoreXY movement with a fully enclosed chamber -- while still offering the build quality, upgradability, and support that the company has built its reputation on. Put simply it's one of the most exciting products they've introduced in a long time, and exactly the kind of machine that many Prusa fans have been waiting for. Unfortunately, there's one feature that's ominously absent from the Core ONE announcement post. It's easy to overlook, and indeed, most consumers probably won't even know it's missing. But for those of us who are concerned with such matters, it's an unspoken confirmation that an era has finally come to an end. With the Core ONE, Prusa Research is no longer in the business of making open source 3D printer hardware, but that doesn't mean that the printer isn't hackable. It's complicated, so read on. Death by a Thousand Cuts To say that Prusa Research pivoting away from the open source hardware (OSHW) principles that guided the company, and indeed the 3D printing community, through its early years is a disappointment would be quite an understatement. It's a crushing blow. One which critics will use to call into question the viability of building a sustainable business model around OSHW. But it's also not hard to see how we got to this point. [coreone_xl]Prusa XL The first warning sign came back in 2021, with the announcement of the Prusa XL. With this new high-end printer, the company seemed uncharacteristically hesitant to open things up, which frankly wasn't entirely unreasonable. The pricing of the XL put it closer into the professional market than a traditional hobbyist machine, and there were some new features like tool changing and a segmented heated bed that were unique enough that they'd want to keep the details under wraps until the machine at least got a foothold in the market. So if Prusa wanted to play this one a little closer to the chest, so be it. But things took a concerning turn last year with the release of the i3 MK4. Although Prusa still called the printer open source in their marketing, the reality was a bit more complicated. While at least some of the printer's technical information was made available, especially the elements that were inherited from the earlier i3 models, there were several rather large omissions. Printable parts were available only as STLs, there were no design files released for the printer's control board, and the Nextruder (which was introduced with the XL) remained all but completely proprietary. Many argued that the MK4 didn't meet the standards that Prusa had set with their previous printers, and that continuing to call it open source was misleading. If it wasn't already obvious that Prusa's commitment to open source was beginning to waiver, Josef's post on the Prusa Blog made his position abundantly clear. Framed as a call for discussion, the post outlined his feelings on the open source community and what he perceived as the failures of common licenses such as the GPL. While he said that the company still intended to make their machines open, the writing was clearly on the wall. A New Chapter for Prusa To be clear, the Core ONE is of critical strategic importance to Prusa. The company needed a revamped machine to combat increased competition from Chinese printer manufacturers, and while it's not being marketed as a replacement for the i3 MK4, it's not hard to see the direction the market is moving in. The i3 is a workhorse, and won't be going away anytime soon, but the chances that it will see a MK5 at this point seem exceptionally slim. [coreone_nextruder]Prusa will give you STLs for the Nextruder, but that's about it. But the Core ONE also represents a mostly clean slate design, one that shares relatively little with the i3. This frees Prusa from any obligation, perceived or otherwise, to continue releasing the printer's design files. Indeed, the term "open source" only appears once in the announcement post for the printer -- and that's when referring to the firmware and slicer code, which are. Although we don't have documentation or an assembly guide for the Core ONE or the MK4S->Core upgrade kits yet, it looks as if very little of Prusa's remaining open source hardware has been brought forward. Potentially the Core ONE is using some variation of the CC BY-SA 4.0 licensed MK52 magnetic heated bed, but beyond that, we already know that Prusa is still keeping the design files for major components such as the Nextruder and xBuddy 32-bit control board under wraps for the time being. Not Open, But Hackable So we know that Prusa isn't advertising the Core ONE design as open source hardware, and that only limited technical data has been released for the few components and subsystems that it inherits from the XL and MK4S. But what does that actually mean for users like us? That's where things get a little tricky. While Prusa's newer printers certainly do not meet the literal requirements of OSHW, they're still remarkably transparent in a world of proprietary black boxes. We might not get the design files for the printed parts in these new machines, but you'll get STLs that you can run off if you need a replacement. We can also be fairly sure that Prusa will continue their tradition of releasing wiring schematics for the Core ONE as they've done with essentially all of their previous printers, which is more than we can say for the vast majority of consumer products. While the lack of design files for these new Prusa printers is unfortunate on a philosophical level, it's hard to argue that they're any less repairable, upgradable, or hackable than their predecessors. In fact, Prusa's actually made at least one improvement in that department -- announcing that breaking off the control board's "Appendix" security device and installing a new firmware will no longer void the printer's warranty. [coreone_open_lg]An increasingly inaccurate message on the Prusa website. We should also consider that even Prusa's earlier printers have not always been as open as the company would perhaps like us to believe. Sure, for the Prusa Mini you could hop on GitHub and grab the KiCad files for its mainboard, and the design files for the i3 up until the MK3 are available as GPLv2 licensed OpenSCAD code. But the company has never actually provided a complete Bill of Materials for their printers, and even after years of requests from the community, they have still yet to release the source code for their bootloader as they consider it a separate project from the main GPL-licensed firmware. Prusa has always used a somewhat piecemeal method of releasing the source and design files for their products. But it's worked for them up to this point. The bottom line is, makers and hackers will still have plenty to work with, even if things aren't quite as open as we'd prefer. Becoming Your Own Enemy On a personal note, I find myself conflicted. I'd argue that the i3 MK3 is one of the best purchases I've ever made, and there's no doubt in my mind that the "Prusa Experience" -- support, reliability, upgradability -- is worth spending the extra money on. I'm also confident that the Core ONE is precisely the kind of machine Prusa needed to remain competitive in today's market. [coreone_bambu]Who's copying who? At the same time, there were issues that I was willing to overlook because the company was producing open source hardware. When a shipping date slipped, or a firmware update introduced a new issue, I let it slide because it was for the greater good. But now that they're no longer calling their printers open source, I can't help but feel some of that goodwill evaporating -- and I'm probably not the only one having similar thoughts. Ultimately, the part that bothers me the most about this change in Prusa's approach is that it all seems predicated on a bogeyman that I'm not convinced actually exists. The company line is that releasing the source for their printers allows competitors to churn out cheap clones of their hardware -- but where are they? Let's be honest, Bambu didn't need to copy any of Prusa's hardware to take their lunch money. You can only protect your edge in the market if you're ahead of the game to begin with, and if anything, Prusa is currently playing catch-up to the rest of the industry that has moved on to faster designs. The only thing Prusa produces that their competitors are actually able to take advantage of is their slicer, but that's another story entirely. (And of course, it is still open source, and widely forked.) So will the Prusa Core ONE be a good printer? Almost certainly. Will I buy one? Very likely. But part of me will always be disappointed that the guy with the open source hardware logo tattoo took his ball and went home as soon as the game starting getting tough. * [share_face] * [share_twit] * [share_in] * [share_mail] Posted in 3d Printer hacks, Current Events, FeaturedTagged MK4S, open source hardware, oshw, prusa, Prusa Core ONE Post navigation - FreeCAD Version 1.0 Released If Life Gives You Lemons, Build This Lemontron - 24 thoughts on "With Core ONE, Prusa's Open Source Hardware Dream Quietly Dies" 1. Stappers says: November 20, 2024 at 10:59 am Best "buyer beware" notice I have seen in a looonng time. Report comment Reply 2. Mike says: November 20, 2024 at 11:01 am All they did was basically copy Bambu Labs X1C printer. An amazing printer to say the least. Yet Prusa is more like a Harbor Freight copy of it. Report comment Reply 1. J K says: November 20, 2024 at 11:27 am Closer comparison is Apple vs Android. Bambu revolutionized printers and has a very strong platform, but the costumer service is laughable, the machines are impossible to do repairs on by design (let alone hack), and anything they do give back to the community has to be clawed out of their hands. As a comparison, Prusa has great costumer service, is easier to repair (and thus hack), and is (fairly) open source, in fact they're the entire reason Bambu has such a competent slicer in the first place. Report comment Reply 2. Grawp says: November 20, 2024 at 12:05 pm So all enclosed CoreXY printers are now Bambu copies? What about those that existed long before Bambu? Like all those opensource Vorons and gazzilion other printers both proprietary and opensource. Report comment Reply 3. Vinny says: November 20, 2024 at 11:02 am I think it is unfair to compare Prusa to Bambu Lab. The latter may not have copied anything from Prusa, but they did had influences from Open Source projects. This quote is taken directly from their site's page for the X1C: "Acknowledgement We express our thanks to the 3D printing community. We have learned a lot about 3D printing from YouTube channels, Reddit discussions, and open source projects. We would like to thank Teaching Tech; his calibration page inspired us to implement the Lidar to do the all important calibrations automatically. We would also like to thank MirageC. If it had not been for his HevORT's stunning performance, we would not have set our target acceleration to 20 m/s^2 two years ago. Finally, we would like to thank the Voron team. We have done many feasibility analyses and evaluation experiments on a Voron 1.8 during the early days of this project." Also, let's not forget that Chinese companies have been subsidized from their government in order to dominate the market, which is plain unfair competition Prusa have to go against. Is Prusa letting go of the Open Source ethos sad? Yes, it is. But at the end of the day they are a company, and as a company they have to decide what's better for their business. There are still loads of other Open Source 3D printers still available, so anyone who really cares about that can still "vote" using their wallets by not purchasing Prusa printers. Report comment Reply 1. SanePersonInTheRoom says: November 20, 2024 at 11:19 am There is a a lot of tinfoil to this reply. Every nation supports its companies to some extent and Prusa has many agencies in Europe that buy their printers due to where they are based as well. I'm tired of this Chinese bogeyman rhetoric that constantly sees Prusa given every bit grace possible and portrays every Chinese company as the devil. With your quote you took a company acknowledging the advancements of hobbyists and tried to twist it into indicating that their machines were in any way clones. Prusa isn't open source either yet you don't have the same thing to say for them. Report comment Reply 4. Jan Praegert says: November 20, 2024 at 11:09 am What a world we live in. First Jurgen Klopp, now Josef Prusa. Report comment Reply 5. Joe says: November 20, 2024 at 11:14 am Whelp, I never bought a Prusa, but now I'm gonna not buy it harder. My next printer will be a DIY Voron. Report comment Reply 1. Greg A says: November 20, 2024 at 11:27 am heh i'm ambivalent about prusa changing direction but my printer just turned 10 years old and its mild maintenance problem is becoming slightly more acute. last week i had to print a replacement part while manually feeding the extruder with my fingers! it had some under-extrusion, of course, but it worked well enough to print a proper replacement. so the phrase "my next printer will be a ___" resonates with me. and i'm not making any predictions...i hope to enjoy the uncertainty: will i buy a product, or build another kit, or simply maintain this one "forever" like the ship of theseus?? is the catastrophe of printing a replacement part on a broken printer the straw that broke the camel's back? or proof that the dreaded can happen and i can still cope? i am waiting to turn the page and find out :) Report comment Reply 6. clancydaenlightened says: November 20, 2024 at 11:22 am The problem with open source hardware is that as a company you literally give away your products and intellectual property away for free So where is the profit at? That's why windows and Microsoft office isn't open source Same with adobe acrobat and PDF Etc. Open source from a business pov is the worst business model, can't make money if you give it away. Once you make something better then maybe you can release the source code and schematic/blueprint and charge more for the superior products Report comment Reply 1. Greg A says: November 20, 2024 at 11:38 am you can't make money on software sales while giving software away. you can't make money on design sales while giving a hardware design away. but you can still make money on selling the hardware itself, though obviously sharing the design gives you some competition. you can also make money selling support or integration. and you can of course make money on extras and so on. for example, intel contributes significantly to open source projects, and they are rewarded in hardware sales...the thing they sell (chips) isn't the same thing they give away for free (kernel drivers). just as one oddball example...i make an open source app that is free on the google play store and it has generated enough interest that someone has offered to pay me to make a branded / customized version to be bundled with their own product. i wasn't interested because that wasn't really part of my plans but these little opportunities do pop up. yeah, they could hire anyone to fork my project, but they started by making me an offer first. in other words, ymmv. open source can certainly rule out certain business models, but enable others. and there are more important things in the world than profit. shrug Report comment Reply 2. it's different says: November 20, 2024 at 11:46 am How many scratch built prusas are you aware of? Most people shied away from the kit versions let alone building from scratch. The business models for open source are different.. not necessarily worse. Prusa was selling experience, quality, convenience and support. The parts cost in the printers were a fraction of the cost of the printer. Report comment Reply 3. Jan says: November 20, 2024 at 11:47 am That's a fallacy. That assumes that the only business model that exists is selling boxed software/hardware ("box-less" downloads included). Sure, that's the easiest model to make money off but it is far from the only one. There are plenty of companies around that produce free (as in freedom, not beer) software - and make a living from providing proprietary add-ons, paid services built around the software, etc. WordPress, Redhat, Grafana, Docker, Apache Foundation, Mozilla ... In the world of hardware just look at SparkFun. Unfortunately a lot of people don't understand neither the market nor the license they have used. That something is under GPL doesn't mean that someone else will do the legwork for you and go to the courts to enforce it against eventual violators. Or that GPL really means "free for anything" - including becoming the author's direct competitor. It isn't "open and free - but only if you don't compete with me". Prusa was justifiably pissed because of the tons of cheap I3 clones that were using his R&D and undercutting his business. But then he either should have chosen a different business model than "shifting boxes" because the entire thing was not exactly unforeseeable - Czech factory producing the machines from 3D printed parts and mostly hand-assembling them can't exactly compete with far East mass-produced goods. 3D printers are a commodity - also thanks to Prusa's work. Or he shouldn't have opened the machines up to begin with. Which would have likely gotten him bad press, given that he has started off from the open source RepRap project (as did majority of those early bird consumer 3D printing companies) - and most likely not helped him any in the long run because it isn't like there wouldn't be consumer 3D printing if there wasn't Prusa. He and his company were far from the only ones in the low cost printer market and even the open source ones. He did a lot of important and innovative work - but his complaining about "freeloaders ripping him off" is just butthurt. His company has also been asleep at the wheel the last few years, producing rehashes of the existing designs while the world was moving in a completely different direction and has long outpaced him. Report comment Reply 1. clancydaenlightened says: November 20, 2024 at 12:17 pm Well I can open source a nuke then That's why open source hardware is not a good business model Have you ever studied business economics or ran a successful business? Open source people just want free shit IMHO Report comment Reply 1. clancydaenlightened says: November 20, 2024 at 12:19 pm Especially when It comes to computer and especially Linux and video games They hide piracy and cyber crimes behind the open source excuse Report comment Reply 4. Anonymous says: November 20, 2024 at 12:38 pm In addition to the other well written rebuttals, it's always possible to limit your license in ways that keep people from wholesale copying and selling a competing product. A ton of OSS make money by being fully open source and free for the end user but cost money for a license and support for businesses. So it's not needed to fully lock things down to hide from competition. I also want to echo the other sentiments that their printers have been behind the curve for awhile now so copycats are likely not a real concern. Report comment Reply 1. Foldi-One says: November 20, 2024 at 2:43 pm It becomes required to lock things down and hide details from the competitors when the Chinese in particular are great a creating a cheaper illegal clone product but neither their government or yours will actually prevent these clones from being sold in your own backyard... I agree you don't have to use any particular model for your business and many can work, but hardware as it has so much more R&D costs is exceptionally difficult to make a viable open source business while the clone that breaches the limits of your license is never made to obey, pay damages, kept off the market etc. Report comment Reply 5. Ostracus says: November 20, 2024 at 2:58 pm Problem is hardware and software behave according to different dynamics. Calling them open doesn't change that. Report comment Reply 7. Drew says: November 20, 2024 at 11:49 am Prusa has to deal with some real market forces and subsidies from China. He is still focused on rock solid products and I don't get the vibe he is wanting to "close source" and take it private and make all this money like you've seen with some other projects. My take is he's trying to protect his offering the best he can. Will it still be highly hackable? Yes! Replacement parts that you can easily swap? Absolutely. Stellar customer service? Sure why not. This all reads to me like he's "the man in the arena" dealing with reality while carrying on with his principles. It's easy to bemoan him not meeting some perfect ideal if you're not actually trying to live by the ideal and literally run a company. My Prusa printers have been amazing. Im ride or die with him. Report comment Reply 8. John says: November 20, 2024 at 11:51 am I don't find a problem with this. It's hard to make money with open source hardware. Prusa does not have blank check product development by a government agency to my knowledge. I would rather them stay alive and profit than go bankrupt and remain open source. I don't want another DJI only market like what the consumer drone space has became. When a government can pay for all your pitfalls in a public arena, no one wants to play anymore. Report comment Reply 9. John says: November 20, 2024 at 11:55 am Of all the commercial 3d printer manufacturers, Prusa still track closer to the open source philosophy, and contributed more to the open source community than its closest competitors. The ability to upgrade from the current bed slinger Mk4, like the one I have, to the newer CoreXY Core ONE runs contrary to the mass market disposable appliance mindset, but fit the hacker ethos rather well. Report comment Reply 10. Jouni says: November 20, 2024 at 12:18 pm That is a bargain for a Prusa printer. I was expecting the price to be somewhere between 2-3kEUR. Such a quality printers, I love my MK4S. Perfect print every time. Report comment Reply 11. TG says: November 20, 2024 at 1:09 pm Alas, it is the fate of all open source projects... Fork it, and continue elsewhere. Report comment Reply 12. Phillip L Barrett says: November 20, 2024 at 2:29 pm I started 3DP with an early Prusa clone. It was fiddly and I spent more time making the machine work than I did just printing parts. I shoved it into a corner and it collected dust until I gave it away years later. Bambu recognized that there was a decent sized market that doesn't see 3DP as an end to itself but rather a tool that needs to just work. I'm fine with it not being open sourced. I really would rather spend time on projects and not leveling the bed, calibrating filament, getting the temperature right for best bed adhesion and diagnosing a litany of errors and fixing them. Maybe some people live to tinker with their 3DP, I just want it to work. Open Source doesn't move my meter much. The X1C is not perfect and I might give the new Prusa a look. What I don't see is a decent entry against the AMS. I love being able to print from up to 16 different filaments without touching the machine. I know many people use AMS for multicolor prints but I just like having a decent number of types available. Plus multicolor is terribly wasteful. I clean up my bed after each print so the machine is available to print the next one. The machine lives in my basement and my office is upstairs. I send off the print when I finish the design and only have to go down to the machine when the print is done. It still requires a little fussing but it is on the level of what I do with my table saw and other shop equipment. Prusa, take notice, your customer base is changing. Report comment Reply Leave a ReplyCancel reply Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy) This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. 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