MakerBot Merging With Stratasys

MakerBot Industries, creators of the popular Thing-O-Matic and Replicator line of 3-D printers, is being acquired by Stratasys, a company that's been working on 3-D printing and production systems since 1989. '[Stratasys] facilitates the printing of prototypes, concepts, components, parts and more on an industrial scale and for commercial applications. ... Stratasys has demonstrated it’s going to be aggressive about owning the 3D printing space, and the MakerBot buy is the consumer-focused piece in that puzzle. For MakerBot, it gives the startup access to Stratasys’ wealth of industry experience.' According to the official news release, 'MakerBot will operate as a separate subsidiary of Stratasys, maintaining its own identity, products and go-to-market strategy.' MakerBot has sold 11,000 of its Replicator 2 devices in the past 9 months, accounting for half of all its 3-D printer sales since 2009.

Comments

Patents?

[Guspaz]

Stratasys has some patents on 3D printing, so that might be relevant here. One of their more important patents is about making a 3D FDM printer (like the makerbot) with an enclosed build area. Nobody but stratasys is allowed to enclose the build area (existing printers normally have the build area open-air to avoid this patent). Obvious, yes, but nobody has bothered to challenge it yet.

Perhaps makerbot realized that if they wanted to continue to improve their product, they'd start running afoul of such patents, hence the merger?

Re:Patents?

[Applekid]

They have now aquired Makerbot and will keep it seperate, which means they can now start trolling other companies with their stratasys patents and keep selling under the Makerbot name avoiding backlash from the community in general.

Makerbot has already sullied their name in the community by stealing from the Open Source guys, claiming credit for all home 3d printing innovation despite the existence of the Reprap project, and putting terms of service on their object repository Thingiverse that basically says, regardless of the license you select for the works you upload, you give them a permanent, irrevocable right to do whatever they want rights-wise with your stuff, including commercial use and only a "promise" in a blog that they won't violate that trust. Except, now, it's Stratasys's trust now. Ha.

Makerbot might not be "industry leader"

[Dekker3D]

Back in may 2012, more people used RepRap style printers than Makerbot-produced ones (even though Makerbots should, by all means, counts as RepRap-style, but let's not get into that). I'm not sure if the tables would've turned so much in one year. Perhaps they have. And yeah, I'm aware that RepRap might not count as part of the industry due to its DIY nature. But still, the article implies that most desktop 3D printers that people acquire/use are Makerbots and that just irks me.

I'd appreciate if you people had a gaze at http://surveys.peerproduction.net/2012/05/manufacturing-in-motion/3/, one page in a set of results from a survey back in may 2012. It may provide some useful insights.

Bre is a whore.

[djh101010]

Bre has abandoned the people who gave him his start. Sorry, but abandoning the first-gen "Cupcake" bot, 3 MONTHS after the next bot came out, and doing the same to the Thing-O-Matic folks, is a slap in the face to the open-source community who gave him his start. He's nothing other than a money-seeking whore, who betrayed his early supporters for the Almighty Buck. Even today's software updates, which have nothing different from the Whatzitplicator mark 1 and 2 other than a volumetric envelope setting, Makerbot Industries have abandoned the ones who gave them their start and turned into the entity that they pretended to not be part of. I wonder how many months before Bre adds some DRM crap to his supplies so you can only print stuff on Makerbot printers if you buy their own branded, DRM'd, overpriced filaments. And to think that I supported you, Bre. What an idiot I was. You seemed so sincere.