Pulling Back From Open Source Hardware, MakerBot Angers Some Adherents

You likely know MakerBot Industries as the poster child for the new era of 3D-printing. You might not know that, until last week, the company and its CEO, Bre Pettis, were considered shining lights in the open-source hardware movement...

Until last week when MakerBot announced its new Replicator 2 3D printer and new Makerware 3D-printing software, the company's products thus far have all met the purest definition for open source hardware. With these new products, MakerBot has veered away from open source. In a recent blog post, Pettis says, "For the Replicator 2, we will not share the way the physical machine is designed or our GUI because we don't think carbon-copy cloning is acceptable and carbon-copy clones undermine our ability to pay people to do development."...