I'm sympathetic to their goals. They want to make sure all of the hardware and software is open for their customers to be able to arbitrarily examine and modify, which is laudable and is very much the sort of thing that 3D printer customers care about. But also they're desperately searching for a way to research and design new printers without some other company immediately selling exact clones of their devices. A "here's all the plans, do whatever you like...except making and selling our exact device" license seems like an extremely fair compromise, especially compared to the default choice of "stop being open to make cloning harder."
Comments are right that bans of that sort are pretty much definitionally not "open source," and Prusa would be wrong to use that term if they went down this path. I think, though, that there should definitely be a space for companies that want to preserve their copyright but also be very open with their hardware and software. It'd just need a different word.
Comments are right that bans of that sort are pretty much definitionally not "open source," and Prusa would be wrong to use that term if they went down this path. I think, though, that there should definitely be a space for companies that want to preserve their copyright but also be very open with their hardware and software. It'd just need a different word.