Prusa has learned nothing

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2024-11-25 15:30:41

Last week, Prusa introduced the CORE One, it's new, fully enclosed CoreXY 3D printer. In many respects, it's exactly what customers have been asking Prusa to create since Bambu Lab shook up the market in 2022.

In other respects, it's a massive disappointment as it marks the death of Prusa's open hardware and fundamentally misses why Prusa has struggled to compete in the consumer 3D printing space.

Open source hardware isn't just a buzzword or a warm fuzzy feeling, it has a definition and a certification that was crafted by the very people who made open source hardware a reality. Prusa's own Prusa Mini is certified OSHW. Prusa's own about page explains the importance of OSHW to Prusa:

Prusa built and ran their company on open source- their core hardware designs evolved from RepRap, their firmware is a wrapper around Marlin, and their slicer is an evolution of Slic3r. They have obviously contributed so much back to the community as they've put enumerable amounts of work into these projects in the course of bringing their machines to life and to market.

But that isn't the end of the story. Prusa's own statement speaks of a Prusa that no longer exists. Since facing increasing competition from non-Western companies like Creality and Bambu, Prusa has chosen to turn its back on the very community that it built itself around. Despite Josef Prusa's insistence that open source allows competitors to "steal" his company's work and contribute nothing back, that is categorically false - I went into further detail in my previous post, but as a pithy one-liner consider that Creality has 3 OSHWA certified printers to Prusa's one.