Due to time constraints I'm gonna be brief (ok, I intended to. Fuck it.), and I'm gonna write in English so this can reach a wider audience. Perhaps. Or not. "Be wary what you wish for" they say, eh? Anyway!

DISCLAIMER: THis stuff is full of opinions. Don't grow attached to them, cause I don't. I make a lot of jokes, and when people tell me I'm crossing the Red Line, I tell them that animu was pretty rad.

I kind of eye affectionately the (xirdal's?) Cupcake makerbot that's in the hackerspce, myself working with a clone of the dual-headed wooden Replicator, and did some stuff with 2X, and that model starts to show some bad design decisions. By 'did stuff' I mean like, pulled it apart and went at it with a file, lathe, drill press, sandpaper, etc. Come to think of it, I rarely print anymore, and my relationships with printers became more intimate. It's kind of fitting that the Hackerspace is located in a dungeon. Ahem.

So.

I'm a latecomer to every party (1). The early makerbot printing hype passed before my eyes unnoticed. I was observing it from a distance, not sure what it was about, and whether it would be nice/good/beneficial to participate.

Now I know it was about a direction.

I browsed old galleries, followed old links, read old blogs... and it looks like a postwar landscape. In a kind of a sad way, but then again, I enjoy post-apo muchly.

So we had a wonderful team. Hoeken and Pettis were a very good pair, regardless of what people seem to think about Pettis, and what Hoeken may be doing out in China. A hardware guy and a marketing guy, a great brand... and suddenly you have a lot of people developing things for a de facto corporation! I mean, the way they scaled up was amazing. And the amount of research and development was crazy awesome. And Thingiverse was a brilliant idea that hit the spot. And they were on a right path, perhaps one to parallell Elon Musk's (except he was only one guy).

They could have changed the way hardware was developed. There was a lot of dedication from the user base, a lot of belief, a lot of wanting more, a lot of participating in something bigger, and a lot of making something awesome. And it was all heading the right way, seemingly, following Hoeken's vision of a machine that can make stuff (not only print, mind you).

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the sho... Well, ok, I've seen mods of this device that were brilliant. They were gamechangers. They are from, what, 2009? Those things didn't feel like free gold,jewels and uranium, they felt like cheat codes, even when you find them 5 years later! Those were the things that went 'holy fuck'(2) in my head for 72 hours duration at 7 hertz. And they were usermade, often modelled with software I would't touch with a dick-tentacle ripped out of alien cloaca, stiffened with wire and wrapped in paper towels.

(Note the alliteration. I couldn't do that if this were not English.)(3)

Now, if you look at that landscape, it's all there, like juicy, fruitful ruins of dead cities. (4)

Beause there is no one who could pick up what Makerbot left off. Many of their solutions are beginning to be cloned, successful, and closed source. I could name companies. There are several. Oh, Opensource? Cannot patent? Sorry dear friend, but this is not how it works. I could patent my mom's tits, and she would have to shave them off, or face a $6M lawsuit. Well, she would win, eventually... ... but not until she paid up the costs. See a hook here? Or, should I say, a bandsaw?

Skeinforge, oh god, this is a 3d printer... printu... printing...person's? dream. I could do things to it that the Shortbus movie is too prude to show. It's years ahead of everything out there, and it's from 2012 (last update, last time I checked). I remember people being hyped about Slic3r and then Makerware and Cura, and now I am delighted to see how many battle hardened 3d printerers (rererers) return to this glimmering sapphire of duct tape, paper bags, styrofoam and wood glue, and produce the most amazing results. Hell, this bunch of Python scripts now sits behind several closed source applications, or is bundled with them contary to the license, AND NO ONE GIVES A HAMSTERFISTFUCK.(5)

It's all out there, all those ruins plundered by everyone, closed into black boxes, driven to their enclaves like war loot, and sold as dumb shiny blobs with a sticker "NEW"!. And Ultimaker disappeared somewhere, or maybe they are outside of this Fallout mind-map of mine. I don't feel that there is this soul of making crazy stuff surrounding them as it was with Makerbot, I appreciate what they do, but it feels like careful marketing more and more.

Like wanting a piece of cake on your boss's birthday party.

And in the end, all this stifles development, pushes us back into our human condition.

When my kids grow up, I'm gonna tell them a story, along the lines of "Once upon a time we had a hardware equivalent of Linux that got sold to a big corporation that could have became Redhat, but they chose to become Microsoft, and it's another 40 years since they decided to release something opensource."

********

But it all proved a point. Today we have full-metal-frame printers that look nice and cost tons of money. And people buy them. The fun thing is that they are in no way better than the second lasercut generation of the makerbots. I've printed those things to death. Several deaths actually, break it fix it, as the saying goes. I could print anything on them. While the closed ones? Well, they go like bouncers in a night club when you grab the wrong kind of ass one time too many. Protip: you don't get a refund, unless you count the bruises. Hell, when I pay for it, I want to grab ass all I like! I'll stick with my opensource stuff that makes those squealing startup efforts sound like a pig farm fed tortillas.

The amount of R&D and released projects and clones this hardware model has to offer is unprecedented. Makerbot was the first working open source firm, and after all that time, I think I'm fairly certain I've pinned down most of the elements that made it tick (in b4 tock, in b4 Intel). It has proven that the open company model, the prosumer-participating company model, the let's-do-stuff-together and our-clients-are-a-part-of-us model has amazing benefits to offer. It's like crowsourced design thinking(6).

What I'm worried about is how much fucking time is it going to take this species to discover that cooperations makes things 600% more awesome? A single then-opensource company pushed the development of a device stagnant for 30 years to unprecedented levels within 3-4 years, on a limited budget. Once it went closed-source, the market divided, shit gone closed source, development not only became stagnant but actively REGRESSED. It will take 3 to 4 generations of closed source FFF printers to match what Makerbot was before it was sold.

*********

Now, what's worrisome is that the Makerbot was a one of a kind company. OK, PeachyPrinter may be another, but time will tell. Most people at hackerspaces are more interested in their corporate jobs and their Dells/Thinkpads or in staying homeless and angry than actually BETTERING THE HUMAN CONDITION. I would even say that they are actively UNCOOPERATIVE, they are like an amorphous liquid that fucking STAYS LIQUID for, like, fucking EVER, be it polar winter or equatorial monsoons. And if they do finally harden, we get Makerbot, that breaks easily under tension (or repeated stress. Like amorphous metals. Durr hurr.)

I am not satisfied with this state of affairs. I am majorly pissed, actually. Pissed, disillusioned, and busy working my ass off to the limits (dis?)allowed by biology, for this shit will not stand.(7) Bring it on, world, we'll have a topless battle and I will gouge your eyes out with my nippless, because they're as hard as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore! (yes, this is a movie reference, no don't goggle it, I'm a duckduckfag, in b4 Amazon. All is futile, go watch External World).

********** (1) and I always bring a taser (2) in Christian mythology Angels don't have sex organs, you have to carve your way in. (3) if anyone tells you that studying Arts is useless, show them this message. My state educated me to my full ability when it comes to writing these things. Poland, you're the best, even if your english is funny. (4) I didn't mean the corpses you sick fuck. (5) Ok, I give, but that could possibly put me in conflict with animal right activists. (6) I hate... uh, ok, I'm sceptical towards this term, it was annexed by the wrong kind of people. To both those terms actually, it feels like they blanket-cover more shit than content. We should let it dry in the sun for a while and pull off the blanket, the shit would stick and we'd end up with the real deal. I wonder if you could commercialize this process in chemistry. Or sociology. Or eugenics... (7) Unless you imagine alternate history with Columbus and the egg...