[TaylorAlexander]

A few notes: The patents were a huge impediment. They did not expire till 2008 - before then printers cost $25k. They were expensive and stratasys had no incentive to make them $300 like they are today so volumes were limited. From their release in 1995 until 2008 stratasys sold like 13000 printers according to their company history web page. For a long time now Prusa has shipped more printers than that in a single month. The Reprap Darwin wasn’t built until late 2007, then makerbot and others followed. I bought an Ultimaker in 2011 and that’s when it feels to me like home printing started to become viable.

Once anyone could build their own design, a community of hackers and engineers formed that continuously improved the designs with diverse ideas and experiments. That community is what made 3D printing what it is today. And it was illegal for them to do all of that (in many countries) until the patent expiration in 2008. That’s a big reason why it took so long. I think it’s interesting to consider whether this would have happened sooner if they had never been patented, though perhaps the expired patent created a legal safe haven where no one could take away the basic principles by patenting them. Anyway, patents play a big role in this story!

Edit: Some cool history here: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/interview-dr-adrian-bowy...

[kragen]

Note that Bowyer doesn't mention the patents at all in this interview, so I question your assertion that the patents were a huge impediment to him. Possibly they dissuaded other people from starting a RepRap-like project years earlier, but I think the vast majority of such people didn't even imagine that an affordable 3-D printer was possible.

[TaylorAlexander]

Ah that’s a fair point. I asked him:

https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4...

I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me.

So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space. And I’ve heard directly from 3D printer hacker developers that patents affected their decisions not to prototype certain new components. Sorry I can’t point you to a source directly but this would probably have been on the mailing list for the Bay Area Reprap club in 2010-2014, or the Ultimaker mailing list in the same timeframe.