https://thedriven.io/2024/09/04/the-biggest-electric-school-...

“You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty.”

“You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above.”

https://github.com/prusa3d/Original-Prusa-i3/blob/MK3S/LICEN...

At the very least China is generally gonna have everyone else beat on quantity of people involved in quite a lot of things.

Doesn’t New York City do this with a soda tax?

https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4...

I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me.

So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space. And I’ve heard directly from 3D printer hacker developers that patents affected their decisions not to prototype certain new components. Sorry I can’t point you to a source directly but this would probably have been on the mailing list for the Bay Area Reprap club in 2010-2014, or the Ultimaker mailing list in the same timeframe.

Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story!

Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mtcURKu

Or put another way, if you’re more familiar with Wikipedia, can you describe how to think about this type of thing being done on Wikipedia? Thanks.