The introduction of a new, closed Prusa CORE One should come as little surprise, but there could be a remedy
A guest article by Paul Jerchel
Commons die without commoning. Over time, free knowledge and common goods all become enclosed and largely inaccessible if there are no processes and continuously cultivated relationships that maintain them independently of their immediate use and nourish them recurrently with external resources and the intellectual input of all those involved. This is a phenomenon that has been little analysed in the field of open source hardware: Numerous industry giants have turned their backs on open source development in recent years, only to subsequently proprietarise open source products or “openwashing” them with products that could not be imitated from the outset.
The fact that 3D printing and deserving open source pioneer Josef Průša has now been forced to distribute large parts of his future workhorse Prusa CORE One in closed source, contrary to previous models, and only partially publish it – with the presumed intention of insourcing the creativity of his customers – may make sense in view of the strong competition in the field of semi-professional 3D printers, but – as some (cf. Nardi, Williams & Flowers 2024) have already emphasised – the risk of losing the central selling point of a Prusa printer. However, the further releases that may be imminent due to pressure from the community will also be entirely within the scope of classic considerations of positioning in the market.
Even if some people are no longer able to hear it, this should mark a new phase in the debate on the institutionalisation of open source hardware, which has already taken some major steps in recent years:
Funding from foundations and public donors, strong international and regional ecosystems, research projects and spin-offs have taken significant steps towards the standardisation and scaling of open source hardware. They will continue to play a central role, but may face difficult conditions in the future. With the Open Science Shop, committed researchers, entrepreneurs and activists have recently joined forces to manufacture and distribute existing open hardware products such as OpenFlexure worldwide. Other business models for the development of open hardware products from science exist. In addition, established platforms such as CrowdSupply have prioritised open source hardware and created scalability.
Nonetheless, previous funding instruments and players have rarely managed to elevate the development effort and innovation funding as a whole above individual projects or individual purchasing decisions – and thus also to decouple it somewhat from daily market events. What can still largely be organised as a non-binding contribution system in FOSS is likely to depend much more quickly in hardware on a democratically planned consolidation of the contributions or the consolidation and coordination of the numerous information flows. The development and production capacities that finalise designs as well as production risks could possibly also be pooled and shared from time to time.
It might make sense to take a look at the “Pattern Language of Commoning” developed by David Bollier, Silke Helfrich and others (see also Bollier & Helfrich 2019), which, among other things, linked individual contribution options with fixed co-determination rights, and compare it with the current institutions in the open hardware ecosystem. Whether a Platform Coop made up of sponsors, developers, producers and users would ultimately have a better chance of lasting open source innovation and commons-based peer production than the current Prusa cannot be said conclusively at present. But it might be worth thinking about it, looking at examples and trying out more. To preserve true openness, we need a partial decoupling from the proprietarising market – and a community-based financing and innovation model worthy of the name.
Image source: Mycena Interrupta – CC-BY-SA 3.0 – JJ Harrison
