Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead – you just don't know it yet

Summary

Hi, FAB 2025 is still happening in Prague and it has been a wonderful event. It’s been great to meet so many people from our community at home, in Czechia! But during my chats with the attendee’s, there was one topic which was emerging time and time again, and that is the state of open hardware. I cannot talk about all of the open hardware, but I can share experience from 3D printing. And it is not good! Open hardware in 3D printing is dead - you just don’t know it yet. This is an opinion piece, imagine we are talking about this topic over a cold Pilsner … What happened? Well, if you are in 3D printing a little bit longer, you must have noticed that over the last 5 years, a huge number of vibrant brands died. Basically every country in Europe and many states in the USA had a couple of their own machines and the industry was very very creative in that regard. Somebody brought an innovation, others adopted it and shared it back. But around the year 2020 we registered the first mention of 3D printing as a strategic industry by the Chinese government. We know that now, after a few years of research. We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases. That is what sparked our interest and research into the subsidies. They exist, and are very efficient https://rhg.com/research/far-from-normal-an-augmented-assessment-of-chinas-state-support/. Our industry, desktop 3D printing, faces a bleak future. Comparable to the automotive sector as if only one high volume car brand, say Audi, remained outside of China. That’s it. An inch away from complete dependency on China in an vital piece of tech, the one absolutely critical for creation of new IP. Patent minefield When looking into the data we were wondering why there is suddenly a multiple fold increase in 3D printing patent applications in China just around the year 2020, take a look yourself. (Data from Espacenet International Database by European P...