this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2026
495 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
83799 readers
3871 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I believe the entire goal of RepRap was to build a machine that could build all the parts needed to build another machine. Most of the parts for a lot of machines are either 3d printable or bog-standard off-the-shelf parts that could be used for millions of other things. I have a feeling the really scary target would be software, something similar to the draconian age-verification BS being run around.
I don't see how they could realistically target Marlin firmware. It's incredibly straightforward software/firmware that could easily be forked and duplicated. Even the old driver boards (Ramps) were originally hand-made pcb's designed by fellow hobbyists.
They make it illegal to distribute, install, use, etc. They make it illegal to sell, distribute, build, etc. any printer that can run on Marlin (hoping to force manufacturers to block anyone installing non-oem firmware on the machines at all).
I'm not saying it's reasonable or feasible, but the people making the laws clearly don't know or care about any of that.
Edit - If they make enough stuff illegal, they don't need to catch you breaking the law when they decide to arrest you. They just arrest you and then figure out which crimes you were committing.
Targetting commercial offers would not cut it though. They would have to make octoprint, open source firmware etc a crime. A lot of printer run exclusively on non-commercial software and on Chinese control boards, with or without raspberry pi.
That's kind of what they already want to do, or are trying to do with this legislation. And the age verification stuff has no exception for open-source. The people behind this stuff absolutely want to kill any and all open source, both hardware and software.