New - Old : Warranty situation
Hello,
Many already read about the new break-out warranty seal on the new Mini board. All Prusa Mini user need to break the board seal in order to flash non-signed firmware. Once done, your warranty is voided for all electronic parts. That includes the stepper driver and any other electronic part. The community seems divided in regards to this topic.
My concern and thoughts are around this support forum and open source development.
1. Support requests. I feel like I shouldn't provide any advanced help to new Prusa owner anymore. Or always adding: "This will void your warranty". If you look at the current help page at least 50% of suggestions placed here could void it.
2. We always had people here who were trying something new. Trying to improve their printer or follow some new ideas. Firmware were provided here and helped many people. It was easy to find people who are willing to try it out. With a seal developers are being pushed into the Prusa developer program. Testing and development will happen in most parts inside this circle. In my opinion it's loosing the known open source development procedure where everybody is invited to do everything.
I know Josef Prusa said that the warranty is not changing. The developer program might improve that the community development being merged earlier into the main brunch. But I still feel like the steps being done are going straight to at least in-house development and the open community development is less appreciated.
What do you guys think about it?
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RE: New - Old : Warranty situation
From a Corporate Governance viewpoint, there was an identified risk that unskilled programmers were dumping essential safety related firmware code to make space for their pet modification, and the Company had to take steps to protect itself and the majority of users.
10 years ago 3D printing was still the realm of the technically skilled, today that is no longer true - in a large part due to the efforts of Josef Prusa. MakerBot took the open source developments of the RepRap movement and created proprietary firmware to run his clones. Josef stayed aligned with the project aims and published everything - even today, anyone can download Prusa firmware, modify it and run it on any machine they choose.
The Buddy board seal does not stop owner modification of the firmware, it only takes away the ability to lie about having done so.
Open source requires publishing of the code and a willingness to consider submitted user modifications for inclusion in future releases. It does not require the originator to accept, endorse or support any of the suggested changes.
Bill
Tagaytay City, Philippines
Founder member of Philippines Prusa Printer Owners FB Group
Sponsor Pillars of God Academy in Bacoor
RE: New - Old : Warranty situation
Note that in many places it is illegal to void warranty on the basis of the user having opened the device ("Warranty void if broken" seals) or third party software is installed. In the US this falls under Magnuson-Moss, the EU has similar laws. Before they can refuse warranty service the manufacturer has to be able to prove the non-OEM software or changes caused the fault. Sometimes it's obvious (third party ink, your printer clogs, tough bananas) and in other cases it is very much not the cause (custom ROM on a phone, and your display develops dead pixels). Seems like general CYA to me, and I would think it's a safe bet this is coming on the tails of the recent scare of a Mk3 that caught fire which was deemed to have been caused by user modifications. It's a sad state of affairs we live in such a litigious society where people take no responsibility for their own actions, foolish as they may be.
RE: New - Old : Warranty situation
I'm also interested to see where the developer program goes. I've made a few contributions to the firmware myself and would probably do more (esp. features aligning with my own needs) if (as proposed) they help out with hardware for your dev situation. As it's my only printer I don't want to do anything that goes into a risk of bricking it. I'm curious what the requirements for that program will be; I'm guessing you must be either invited or a known contributor to the community or something to deter freeloaders. It could very well simply end up being an extension of the current beta testers program; You are after all running an RC and while the risk is much lower, it's still possible an undiscovered bug could cause hardware damage.