I've been a Prusa defender for a long time, including when they added the break-off tab to enable custom firmware which caused a lot of upset.

They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past.

My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good.

They were so deeply undercut by Chinese clone vendors that buying Prusa made little sense to consumers. They couldn't survive without banning them. The situation was similar to IBM PC, but Prusa Research was no IBM.

Their printers are no longer open source hardware, according to the definition endorsed by a certain Josef Pruša https://freedomdefined.org/OSHW#Endorsements

It’s rough but I understand it.

You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.

It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).

At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.

I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.

Isn't Voron/Soval more open?

I understand your point, but to compete against bambu, I think is necessary. I still find is the best option.

So you want European companies to keep being nice and "open", do all the research and invent new technologies and products for the chinese to copy and sell cheap clones of!

It’s not problematic to restrict people from selling the thing you designed, made and sell without permission.

If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.