By Michael Krieger: I have been attending the excellent Liberty on the Rocks (LOTR) events in Denver as of late, which take place on the 1st and 3rd weeks of every month. These informal meetings often have guest speakers, and are filled with liberty-minded thinkers and entrepreneurs. If you live in the area, I strongly suggest you attend.
Last week’s speaker really caught my attention. His name is Harris Kenny, and he is the Communications Manager at Aleph Objects, Inc., the company that makes LulzBot 3D printers. I’ve touched on 3D-Printing on several occasions over the years, since it is one of the key emerging technologies which will facilitate humanity’s transition away from centralized, hierarchic and bureaucratic ways of societal organization into decentralized, networked and voluntary systems.
The people at LulzBot clearly share my enthusiasm for the transformative nature of 3D-Printing. For example, in one of their brochures it states:
Like moveable type transformed and democratized communication, 3D-Printing is inspiring innovation and industry.
Comparing 3D-Printing to moveable type is a bold statement, but when one thinks of the ability for this technology to empower individuals and businesses into small-scale manufacturing, its incredibly vast potential becomes clear. All that being said, I didn’t drive an hour to Loveland, Colorado just to see a 3D-Printing company. I drove that distance because
they are an “Open Source Hardware” company, or as they like to call it, “Libre Hardware.”
When Harris first mentioned this concept at the LOTR meeting I was in a state of shock. I had never heard this term before, it initially seemed counter-intuitive and my mind starting reeling in a million different directions. I had to know more.
Most Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will be familiar with the concept of open-source software/code, as it forms the philosophical backbone of the Bitcoin protocol. Open source hardware is essentially the same thing, but related to physical goods. More specifically, something can be seen as open-source hardware if it is a physical item whose source files have been openly shared with the world, and it can be freely copied of modified. Anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or hardware based on that design. This model is being applied to in various fields, including electronic prototyping platforms, open-source satellites, 3D-Printers, and even a volunteer space program! For a comprehensive definition of open-source hardware, see the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA).
While I can easily understand the concept of open-source hardware from a general innovation standpoint (if everyone in the world has access, naturally innovation should increase exponentially), I had a harder time grasping the business advantages to the company itself until Harris explained them.
First of all, being open-source also drives innovation internally. While everyone on earth has access to the files, naturally 99.9% of people won’t actually do anything with them. The people that will work on them most are the engineers, employees and even customers of LulzBot itself. This creates a sense of freedom and creativity that cannot be matched in other work environments. Rather than spending a significant amount of time and energy defending and applying for patents, the employees are constantly thinking and tinkering about with how to make the machine better. There’s no need to build a moat around a castle. This is not just theory either. For example, their flagship printer, the TAZ, was introduced in 2013 and has had six generations in the past year alone. When I asked Harris about some other advantages he stated:
Above all else, granting our users freedom to see how the machine’s made and modify it. This benefits us as a company in two ways, first we have a very sophisticated user community on our forum helping each other solve problems and use our products in new ways (http://forum.lulzbot.com). Second, customer modifications help us improve our products by redesigning parts that we learn from and often incorporate.
Externally, open accessibility helps developers come up with improvements that we can use, especially in the area of printing materials so we iterate quickly and can be very nimble and responsive to the market. For suppliers it allows them to compete for our business so we know we are partnering with the best partners to build our products.
The folks at LulzBot are passionately supportive of this concept, and in the event you are interested in their source files, you can find them here.
Now for some background. The company was started in January 2011 by Jeff Moe, is based in Loveland, Colorado and was born out of a very understandable frustration with the status quo. It started with one employee and has since grown to 30. The facility currently has a maximum sales capacity of 50,000 printers per year. Business is accelerating and May represented the company’s all-time record sales month. The company has customers in 65 different companies and distribution centers in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Its current latest and greatest printer is known as the Taz 4 and it has the largest print area of assembled 3D-Printers under $2,500 in the world (it costs $2,195). The print area is 11.7in x 10.8in x 9.8in (298mm x 275mm x 250mm).
This is what the Taz 4 looks like (with a 3D-printed octopus in the printer area):
Of the 200 parts used to manufacture the Taz picture above, 40 are 3D-printed in house at the LulzBot facility.
In case you are curious of about the origin of the TAZ, the open-source hardware project that put 3D-printing as we know it today on the map is known as RepRap. The TAZ evolved from this original design, and LulzBot has a showcase to demonstrate this evolution:
As the tour continued, I was exposed to a lot of cool stuff, which I will show below. First, here are some racks of TAZ printers solely there for the purpose of employees to print parts as well as general tinkering:
Some of the newer materials now available for printing with the TAZ:
Here’s Harris with some of the various items they’ve had fun printing:
When it was all over, I came away with a renewed sense of optimism about the future. Not simply because I believe in the company’s philosophy, but because it actually works from a business standpoint.
Our decentralized, open-source future is almost here and I couldn’t be more excited.
In Liberty and Libre Hardware,
Michael Krieger
Source
Last week’s speaker really caught my attention. His name is Harris Kenny, and he is the Communications Manager at Aleph Objects, Inc., the company that makes LulzBot 3D printers. I’ve touched on 3D-Printing on several occasions over the years, since it is one of the key emerging technologies which will facilitate humanity’s transition away from centralized, hierarchic and bureaucratic ways of societal organization into decentralized, networked and voluntary systems.
The people at LulzBot clearly share my enthusiasm for the transformative nature of 3D-Printing. For example, in one of their brochures it states:Like moveable type transformed and democratized communication, 3D-Printing is inspiring innovation and industry.
Comparing 3D-Printing to moveable type is a bold statement, but when one thinks of the ability for this technology to empower individuals and businesses into small-scale manufacturing, its incredibly vast potential becomes clear. All that being said, I didn’t drive an hour to Loveland, Colorado just to see a 3D-Printing company. I drove that distance because
they are an “Open Source Hardware” company, or as they like to call it, “Libre Hardware.”
When Harris first mentioned this concept at the LOTR meeting I was in a state of shock. I had never heard this term before, it initially seemed counter-intuitive and my mind starting reeling in a million different directions. I had to know more.
Most Liberty Blitzkrieg readers will be familiar with the concept of open-source software/code, as it forms the philosophical backbone of the Bitcoin protocol. Open source hardware is essentially the same thing, but related to physical goods. More specifically, something can be seen as open-source hardware if it is a physical item whose source files have been openly shared with the world, and it can be freely copied of modified. Anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or hardware based on that design. This model is being applied to in various fields, including electronic prototyping platforms, open-source satellites, 3D-Printers, and even a volunteer space program! For a comprehensive definition of open-source hardware, see the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA).
While I can easily understand the concept of open-source hardware from a general innovation standpoint (if everyone in the world has access, naturally innovation should increase exponentially), I had a harder time grasping the business advantages to the company itself until Harris explained them.
First of all, being open-source also drives innovation internally. While everyone on earth has access to the files, naturally 99.9% of people won’t actually do anything with them. The people that will work on them most are the engineers, employees and even customers of LulzBot itself. This creates a sense of freedom and creativity that cannot be matched in other work environments. Rather than spending a significant amount of time and energy defending and applying for patents, the employees are constantly thinking and tinkering about with how to make the machine better. There’s no need to build a moat around a castle. This is not just theory either. For example, their flagship printer, the TAZ, was introduced in 2013 and has had six generations in the past year alone. When I asked Harris about some other advantages he stated:
Above all else, granting our users freedom to see how the machine’s made and modify it. This benefits us as a company in two ways, first we have a very sophisticated user community on our forum helping each other solve problems and use our products in new ways (http://forum.lulzbot.com). Second, customer modifications help us improve our products by redesigning parts that we learn from and often incorporate.
Externally, open accessibility helps developers come up with improvements that we can use, especially in the area of printing materials so we iterate quickly and can be very nimble and responsive to the market. For suppliers it allows them to compete for our business so we know we are partnering with the best partners to build our products.
The folks at LulzBot are passionately supportive of this concept, and in the event you are interested in their source files, you can find them here.
Now for some background. The company was started in January 2011 by Jeff Moe, is based in Loveland, Colorado and was born out of a very understandable frustration with the status quo. It started with one employee and has since grown to 30. The facility currently has a maximum sales capacity of 50,000 printers per year. Business is accelerating and May represented the company’s all-time record sales month. The company has customers in 65 different companies and distribution centers in the U.S., Canada and the UK. Its current latest and greatest printer is known as the Taz 4 and it has the largest print area of assembled 3D-Printers under $2,500 in the world (it costs $2,195). The print area is 11.7in x 10.8in x 9.8in (298mm x 275mm x 250mm).
This is what the Taz 4 looks like (with a 3D-printed octopus in the printer area):
Of the 200 parts used to manufacture the Taz picture above, 40 are 3D-printed in house at the LulzBot facility.
In case you are curious of about the origin of the TAZ, the open-source hardware project that put 3D-printing as we know it today on the map is known as RepRap. The TAZ evolved from this original design, and LulzBot has a showcase to demonstrate this evolution:
As the tour continued, I was exposed to a lot of cool stuff, which I will show below. First, here are some racks of TAZ printers solely there for the purpose of employees to print parts as well as general tinkering:
Some of the newer materials now available for printing with the TAZ:
Here’s Harris with some of the various items they’ve had fun printing:
When it was all over, I came away with a renewed sense of optimism about the future. Not simply because I believe in the company’s philosophy, but because it actually works from a business standpoint.
Our decentralized, open-source future is almost here and I couldn’t be more excited.
In Liberty and Libre Hardware,
Michael Krieger
Source
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