This is an excerpt from the Hackaday article on the new (proprietary) Prusa printer:

"While the lack of design files for these new Prusa printers is unfortunate on a philosophical level, it’s hard to argue that they’re any less repairable, upgradable, or hackable than their predecessors."

This is not meant as a slight against Hackaday, since their point does make sense and I've left out the context. But I do want to draw attention to the phrasing for a moment: "it's hard to argue that..."

This is *exactly* how it works, how companies close up previously open systems. That it's hard to argue is *not* a good thing - instead, it's the crucial property that makes it possible to close things up in the first place.

If you have a reputation for open-source things, you're not going to suddenly close up everything, that would draw way too much attention and ire from the community. What you do instead, is to gradually close little bits, while assuring people that they can keep doing what they were doing.

You keep nominally offering them the *benefits* of open-source, or at least the appearance of those benefits, but without offering them the thing that *guarantees* those benefits. Then you start slowly chipping away at those benefits, only ever reducing the benefits for a small group without enough sway to speak out against it.

Sure, you still get the STLs, you can still print replacement parts! You can no longer modify the designs to create your own modified version, but hey, only a few people did that anyway, so what's the harm, right? Not like those few people can raise enough of a stink.

By segmenting the group of "people who are losing their benefits" into small enough chunks each time, you can eventually close down the entire thing, without ever pissing off enough people *at once* for it to be a risk to your business. Coordinating activist actions across years is very difficult, after all, so you just need to make sure that one group lost interest before pissing off the next one.

I cannot predict the future of Prusa, and it's possible that they end up being the exception to this process, but it's unlikely. Usually this is how it goes.

The moral of the story here is: if something is taken away from you, and it is "hard to argue" that it really harms you, that is *especially* the moment where you need to be paying attention, because it's often deliberate.