An idea for a funding model for Duet firmware - discuss.

zapta

@arnold_r_clark said in An idea for a funding model for Duet firmware - discuss.:

A key word search for Duet products on Aliexpress just threw up 14 pages

"I cherry picked and found a pattern"

Try search Aliexpress for 3d printer controller board and check the ratio between western and Chinese designs.

That's also the vibe I got in Voron circles, the hot boards are Chinese (SKR, Spider, Octopus, etc).

They are catching up, fast, as the Japanese and the South Korean did.

hackinistrator

I think , at some point open source becomes pointless .
And , i think RRF already reached that stage .

Lets take marlin for example (i didn't use RRF at its early stages) , i remember the days when i tweaked the code to add sensors / change thermistor tables and other settings and felt like a superman .

Or the days when some of us tweaked android phones with custom firmware builds .

It was fun and all , but today at this stage , i never touched RRF source code and never tweaked it .
Same for my android phone , last time i had a phone with an open bootloader was about 10 years ago .

After years of development , the software grows so big , complicated and feature packed that it becomes a real pita / needless to touch it .
So whats the point of the software to be open source at this stage ?
its only relevant to about 0.001% of total userbase , probably less.

jens55

@hackinistrator said in An idea for a funding model for Duet firmware - discuss.:

So whats the point of the software to be open source at this stage ?
its only relevant to about 0.001% of total userbase , probably less.

For one, what if Covid took out @dc42 ?? Wouldn't you at least want somebody to take over maintaining the code?
I don't touch the base code either but it gives me great comfort knowing that at any point I 'could' tweak it.

oliof

@hackinistrator I might be that .001%, but I like to read code and make sure I can do changes if I need to (I did implement a kinematics class but never submitted it upstream because I feel it's incomplete and no usable machine design exists to use it). But I also read documentation and sometimes update small things on the wiki, so I may be an outlier.