cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/47449079
I stumbled across this link in the comment of another post, and thought it was super promising!
Someone mentioned something about in the US, this would be illegal due to DRM laws - not sure about the specifics of this, but regardless an open source printer seems like something we’ve needed for ages, as printers are something that always seem like way more of a headache then they need to be. It seems like such a simple technology that has existed for quite some time, but they are always such a pain to deal with. (Maybe it’s just my bad luck with printers?)
FYI its not actually open source. Its a cool idea but you can’t actually sell it or sell derivatives of it. Even at zero-sum. This hinders any actual forks from being successful, as any intention to sell the product (even without aiming for profits) is forbidden by their license. It just allows for tinkerers as contributors without properly allowing forks. Makes me a bit sad tbh, because its so close to being awesome.
I saw a maker the other day that released his plans on his project with a non-commercial license. He later found it was being sold on Amazon. He contacted an attorney friend of his, the attorneys said that the maker licensees are only truly effective on art.
If it’s a physical functional product, you have very little in the way of legal protection from a creative common license, which kind of sucks because the proper legal method would then be patent, but that puts us in the same scenario that you can’t copy it for a non-profit.
I mean with the right legal set-up you could make it work. Make a foundation that releases it under a non-profit license and holds the patent. It could allow for selling derivatives without major profit margins but it’d be difficult to set up.
Ah yes, the classic “if you can’t build it yourself you don’t deserve it”. Very cool, surely people will not go for an older laser printer instead.
No they sell it, but only the founders themselves. So better than a modern DRM HP Printer but still, not really FOSS sadly. I hope they change their mind on the license
Well that’s disappointing.