this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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Printers are the text book examples of why device manufacturing shouldn't be left to big companies. You have tracking dots, spyware infestation, subscription for ink/toners, reporting of the cartridge as empty when you still have much left in it, refusal to print when unused color cartridges are empty, intentional bricking if 3rd party cartridges or ink is used, and utterly crappy firmware in general.
Inkjets require precision manufacturing. But assembling it or other types from components should be possible - like how desktops, mechanical keyboards, etc can be. We really need to ditch filthy mass market printers because DIY printers will be much better than anything they offer.
I'm pretty sure this measure was requested either by the government or some big three letter agency.
I doubt that, if all printers were manufactured by a government monopoly, you wouldn't have this shit baked in. It would probably be way worse
I'm not at all asking for a government monopoly on making printers, if that wasn't clear.
Open source printers
Use the 3D printer to make the 2D printer. Finally, we are moving in the right direction.
You can tape a pen to your 3d printer to use it as a plotter.
Honestly, yes. I love open source hardware
It's insufferable how people will respond to "We shouldn't let corporations do this" with "OK SO YOU WANT THE GOVERNMENT TO DO IT?!?!"
It's insufferable that the answer is always "build your own." Lemmy assumes that every single person on the planet is an engineer with enough free time to design, build, and troubleshoot every device they own.
It's based in rugged hypercapitalist bootstrap thinking. If something is broken just do it yourself! Even though that's never realistic, and even if it were, no one person can or should be expected to do everything.
I do think it shoukd be left up to (potentially big) companies; however, we should put restrictions on e.g. ink cartrige compatibility, just like what the EU is trying for smartphones and messagin right now.