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Patreon Podcast: Red Hat and the Death of Open Source (Patreon)

Published:
2023-06-29 14:21:01
Imported:
2024-01

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The title may seem like a stretch, but it's not as far-fetched as you may think. Are Red Hat's recent shenanigans just another sign that open source as a concept isn't as robust and sustainable as we all want it to be?

Jeff Geerling's take on the RHEL situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF5pyVUQBH8

Thomas Sanladerer's take on open source in the 3D printing ecosystem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68FkIwCc_eo

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Anonymous

It's funny to me how similar Prusa's situation now is to MakerBot a decade ago. If you look back then, similar ideas of "we must protect our products from outsiders" were being thrown around right about the same time they released the Replicator 2. Unfortunately for them, they undervalued the contributions their community made to the product, and the closed-source nature of the product made it such that repairs were extremely difficult to accomplish. MakerBot ended up getting acquired by Stratasys, a long-time industry player, and now makes horrendously expensive machines that are lacking basic features. For example, MakerBot was selling (and probably is still selling) a PLA-only machine with absolutely NO heated bed functionality for $1500. To be honest, I have no trouble imagining a future where Prusa doesn''t realize that their accusations of other companies refusing to give back to what made them profitable will go back to bite themselves. Sure, Prusa contributies a lot with in-house design and development, but a lot of important technologies, fixes, and code has been pulled from existing projects. If they cut off their relationship with that community, I highly doubt many will be willing to actively contribute to anything Prusa is doing. I also have my doubts about how repairable their machines will remain, as they kept even basic information about Prusa Mini behind closed doors for months until they released their own fully-DIY kit. There wasn't even any official information about what screws to buy if you lost any. If Prusa convinces itself that it needs to take such drastic and suffocating actions to keep the company afloat, I don't think there will be anything recognizable that remains. Prusa will simply be the company you don't want to use, because any time you need to fix your printer because printers often need to be fixed, you won't be able to.

thisdoesnotcompute
>>111790683

Prusa is indeed in an interesting situation, but I don't think it's as bleak as with MakerBot. They seem to be moving towards the industrial space with the TriLab acquisition, and that's a market that definitely just wants to buy tools that work (instead of cobble them together on their own). I don't expect Prusa to suddenly shift to fully closed-source, but they'll probably end up in some sort of acceptable medium where people still feel good about supporting them yet the company is reasonably secure in its future. At least, that's what I hope will happen.

Anonymous

Thanks so much for this view from the trenches, as they say. I'm late to this as a new subscriber - but I appreciate the insight