I would email the editor about the factual inaccuracy in the headline, but they don’t seem to have an editor email address. 🤔
not open source?
Got it in one.
As people on HN correctly pointed out, it’s not fully open source as their license only permits them to manufacture parts for the printer
Open source is generally about the code, not the hardware, even less manufacturing. OSHW (hence the clarification even though a bit longer) is about the hardware and has specific requirements in order to get the label and ID, e.g https://certification.oshwa.org/de000008.html and process https://certification.oshwa.org/process.html
AFAIK there is no terms that means open source + OSHW but I’d love to learn if there is one and apologize in advance if I missed that.
Anyway as I’m interested in the project, which part is proprietary exactly? In theory as they sell via CrowdSupply https://www.crowdsupply.com/apply it should be both OSHW and open source but I didn’t dig.
It states the code and files will be CC-NC licensed, which isn’t open source.
Thanks, I just checked https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer and its says “Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials.” so I don’t think that’s related to the source code but rather the resulting binary of the built firmware.
The latest CrowdSupply project I bought was the PGB-1 and they did realize their firmware source code https://github.com/wee-noise-makers/WNM-PGB1-firmware/ and as GPL3 so I assume they will clarify that before starting the crowd funding campaign. I don’t think they can, even if they wanted to, have a CS project without releasing the source code.
Edit: to be safe I asked on the CS Discord for clarification.
That’s weird. Opening your stuff but not allowing others to make stuff commercially for it?
Someone’s getting assassinated over this.
Nobody is because its not actually open source
So that’s how they’re still alive!
Will the Ferengi Alliance allow this?
A brother laser printer solves all problems. No dry ink and no subscription. I should have gotten one sooner.
It’s not just that, they’re easy to repair, and parts are available. I love laser printers, except for HP
For now : https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Brother_printers_causing_issues_with_third_party_inks
I have one also so I’m invested in how this plays out.
Or a Canon if you can’t afford a Brother.
Prints even without ink, and the software looks and behaves like it’s from 1996 so it’s ridiculously simple. It doesn’t harass you or fill your PC with bloat—the software just hangs out quietly in the background and only pops up when you need to print to inform you of ink levels—it doesn’t bother you with bullshit ever.
The only modern feature it has is network connectivity, which is honestly the only modern feature I need in a printer, so that I can print from my phone without having to boot up my PC first. And that’s even simpler than printing from PC because you don’t even need a driver. Just hit the Print option in Android and start printing.
Yup. I’m on my second now because of an international relocation, but the first one is still going strong at my dad’s. Bought that thing 14 years ago, was the first series that came with network enabled printing instead of USB (though it has a port).
Bought a 19-year-old secondhand Brother printer 2 years ago, still working flawlessly, and everything (drum, toner, etc.) is available when needed.
They will use CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Which means it’s not open source, and no-one else can sell replacement cartridges, parts etc.
It might still be a good printer and enjoyed by some, but it really annoys me when companies mix these terms up, almost certainly deliberately.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Isn’t it about documentation or design rather than code or hardware? Typically CC isn’t used for software or hardware.
from their own page
Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license for all of its files, including electronics and mechanical design files, firmware code, and the bill of materials.
Thanks I addressed that seconds ago https://lemmy.world/post/36926543/19781367 and my bet is that it’s an omission, so I asked on CS Discord just in case but yes people should be mindful of that before the crowd funding campaign start. Hopefully it’ll be fixed.
The cartridges are a HP design. The CC license is the smallest problem here.
The only complex part of the hardware is the HP cartridge controller, and you have at least part of the work here: https://hackaday.io/project/176931-hp-printer-cartridge-control-module/details
Despite the clickbait headline this isn’t open source
Open Printer will use the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
The NC license isn’t open source, it violates point six of the OSD
Creative Commons doesn’t even seem appropriate for hardware. Like, that’s trying to apply copyright law in patent’s realm.
Also means that a robust community of people creating businesses to sell variations of the hardware for those who aren’t as maker friendly cannot emerge, correct?
Bc imo that’s what really got early 3d printing off the ground. Like back in 2010 during the reprap days there were all the independent maker storefronts plus a few bigger ones like lulzbot and makerbot (that eventually all got put out of business or bought for toxic modern shit like bambulab because in the modern day under capitalism every single industry has to consolidate until it’s under a few large extremely consumer hostile companies with okay products that just eventually get worse and worse bc there’s no competition or regulation for them but I digress).
Without this industry or a proper open source platform I don’t see how this will succeed
Also means that a robust community of people creating businesses to sell variations of the hardware for those who aren’t as maker friendly cannot emerge, correct?
Correct, that’s just one of the problems with NC licenses.
On the other hand, we also won’t have any chinese clones (legally) that eventually force the original creators to reduce their open contributions.
legally
Therein lies the other issue, unless the creator has millions of dollars to fund lawsuits, if a large company or Chinese company decides to clone it he can do nothing. The only people who will respect the license are individuals and small businesses.
You’re thinking of Amazon Basics.
Wow, they even did description about open source AI
I love that they also designed some ways to save space. Most of us no longer live in a world where we print multiple times a week. Printers just sit around and take up space while they do nothing for months on end.
This thing is small, wall mountable, and you don’t need to store flat packed paper.
These folks should win a red dot design award for this. Really smart industrial design all around. They really solved a lot of different problems, not just the ink problem.
While I’d personally love to see an open color lazer printer more. (Less wasteful and more rugged) This is still fantastic! It’s always been a saying of mine that modern printers are the torture devices of our time. This could go a long long way to right a lot of these wrongs. I will definitely have to check this out.
While I’d personally love to see an open color lazer printer more. (Less wasteful and more rugged)
I use a black-and-white laser printer, but if I were going to use a color laser printer, I’d like to have an open color laser printer simply because I’d like to have a printer that isn’t dumping printer tracking dots into each image I print.
Yes, I have a black and white brother lazer printer. That thing is a workhorse. Still gives problems every so often, but far more reliable than any inkjet printer I’ve ever had. And far less costly to maintain.
The issue with color laser printers is they generally need a print head for each color iirc.
There are LED laser printers that don’t require this though
Oh I know. No shade on them for starting with inkjet. Long term though the lazer/LED printers are just the more economical and sustainable option. This is a welcome disruption regardless.
We need to do something about companies misusing the term Open to trick people
Can OSI trademark “open source” and sue companies for not meeting its definition?
Trademark is for customers to know who made a thing, not how it works or what you do with it.
I still disbelieved than we are living in the timeline than the fucking printers are DMR restricted.
FUCKING…
PRINTERS…
That’s just the tip of the iceberg of printer issues. I’m in networking, don’t get me started on networking and security issues involved in printing “solutions”
I used to work as IT on a multinational and have few things in this life than i hate more than printers and owls, but they found a way tonmake printers even shittier
We tried the owls in some of our meeting rooms and we scrapped those.
What’s the point of having a 360 camera in the center of the room when everyone will stare at the big TV anyway? All the people at the other end see is everyone looking sideway to the camera.
If you buy their TV bar unit, apparently you can pair the two to cover longer tables. The people in the back are covered by the table unit and the front is covered by the bar.
I know this from reading knowledge base articles because no organization I’ve ever been apart of ever wanted to spend the money on a good system that covered everything properly, so I have never had the chance to do it.
It automatically focuses on whoever is speaking.
Still, most people will look at the TV during the meeting, so all you see is one side of their faces.
I took one of the broken ones from my office, repaired it, and now it allows my dnd campaign to see the DM and all the other players reactions when playing remotely.
What do you have against owls?
having to constantly replace mice
Only the bluetooth ones or also the wired ones?
Are you talking to me? Oh, you weren’t? Then who were you talking to?
Who? Who? Who? Who?
Not hooty owls, it’s a conferencing thing.
I have nothing against the damn pests until they start to making their nests near my house, since the college the same owl have his nest near and the fucking screaming the whole night.
Sometimes even when the mother abandon the nest and the owls grow up one asshole offspring refuses to hunt and spend the night screaming wait for his mom back with, until it gave up on starvation and goes way or (hopefully) dies
Sounds like it sucks at every level. From what I’ve dealt with on just software/drivers:
You want to use scan to email through anything that isn’t a fully open, no auth, anonymous SMTP relay? Go fuck yourself.
Wait… we changed our mind. We’ll totally support SMTP authentication, but with an arbitrary undocumented limit on the password length we can store, which is definitely shorter than the password length requirements for most SMTP relay suites. Certificates? Holy shit are you from the future?
Or you can scan to network share, but I hope you enjoy finding all the hidden catches and caveats that are completely undocumented!
You want an option so people have to log in at the printer itself to release their print job? Enjoy six different interfaces for five different underlying standards for how that works across two different manufacturers. And we reserve the right to just stop supporting that feature or change it entirely with any firmware or driver update. And if there’s a mismatch between the driver and firmware then we’ll just make the print spooler/job queue shit itself and require manual intervention to continue printing.
You want our driver to properly communicate to end user software the paper sizes it supports? If it supports double sided printing or not? How it will collate multiple copies? Man, we can’t even care enough to indicate to software if we’re Black and White or Color. Best we can do is completely ignore the options you picked through your software and our driver and just do whatever we think is best. That’s a good compromise, right?
For the price of these god damn enterprise mfds, there’s no excuse.
You can get inkjet printers that don’t have restrictions on the ink. They cost more, though.
The reason printer manufacturers are so hell-bent on being a pain in the ass with the ink is because they’re using a razor-and-blades model. They’re selling you the printer at a lower price than they really should, if their price reflected their costs, with the expectation that they’ll make their money back when you buy ink at a higher price than you really should, because people pay more attention to the the initial price of the printer than to the consumable costs.
Same way you can get unlocked cell phones instead of network-locked cell phones with a plan. Gaming PCs instead of consoles. It’s not that they’re unavailable, but you’re gonna have to accept a higher up-front cost, because you’re not getting a subsidy from the manufacturer.
Canon sells a line of inkjet printers that just take ink from a bottle. No hassles with restrictions on ink supply there. The ink is cheap, and there are third-party options that are even cheaper readily available…but you’re going to pay full price for the printer.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/printers/megatank-printers
Their lowest-end “MegaTank” printer is $230:
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/megatank-pixma-g3290
A pack of third-party ink refill bottles is $15, and will print (using Canon’s metrics), about 7,700 color pages and 9,000 black-and-white pages:
https://www.amazon.com/Refill-Compatible-Bottles-MegaTank-4-Pack/dp/B0DSPSS5W7
Compatible GI-21 Black Ink Bottle Up to 9,000 pages, GI-21 Cyan/Magenta/Yellow Ink Bottles Up to 7,700 pages
On the other hand, Canon’s lowest-end “cartridge” printer, where they use the razor-and-blades model, is $55.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ts3720-wireless-home-all-in-one-printer
But you rapidly pay for it with the ink; It looks like they presently sell a set of replacement cartridges for $91. And that set will print a tiny fraction of the number of pages that the above ink bottles will print.
page yield of 400 Black / 400 Color pages per ink cartridge set and cost of $90.99 for a value pack of PG-285(XL) and CL-286(XL) ink cartridges (using Canon Online Store prices as of June 2025).
So if you really do want to do photo prints with an inkjet without dealing with all the DRM-on-ink stuff, you can do it today. But…you’re going to pay more for the printer.
All that being said, I do think that lasers are awfully nice in that you don’t need to deal with nozzles clogging. You can leave a laser printer for years and it’ll just work when you start it up. If you don’t need photo output, just less hassle.
I could get into it if it were laser; I’ve long given up on inkjet.
Agreed. But a start is a start. More of this please!
the thing is laser printer is costlier upfront, Bulkier, heavier, needs more space and compared to inkjet printer
That’s true. I don’t print much (I’m happy to go to the print shop) but my wife does quite a bit, but not enough to keep the ink from drying out.
After buying two inkjet printers and having constant problems with the cartridges it probably would’ve been cheaper to start with the Brother laser printer I eventually bought. I didn’t realize that HP would lock out cartridges from their subscription on cancellation either (which feels very morally wrong to me).
It’s technically more money upfront, but you’re not just buying the printer itself: you’re also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.
So that higher upfront cost doesn’t just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.
Basically, if I’m not flat-ass broke, I’m paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what’s the page yield? 430. I’m still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I’m so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.
Unless something about inkjet has improved in the 15 years since I was more inclined to know everything about them, the “goes bad” is what anyone with a brain should be focusing on. The first time you use a cartridge to print, it has a shelf life. It gunks up, prompting cleaning cycles that use dozens of pages worth of ink. If you only print a few pages a month, there’s a good chance you’re getting <40 pages out of that $63 cartridge.
I have a Brother DCP-7065DN, paid $64 for it in Feb 2014 (obviously a very good deal), page counter reads 3626. We’re on toner #3 including the starter, first was replaced in 2019, second in July 2025. Toner was $55 each.
I hope there aren’t people seriously advocating for inkjet printers for black and white anything. The only thing they are good for is photos, and even then you are paying more per print for a worse photo vs local print or online order options. That holds true even if you get good deals and somehow actually use the entire cartridge set without waste, I did the math a few times over the years. The only use cases are printing shit you’re too embarrassed to risk printer shop seeing, or is illegal/copyright, or you just like giving money to these garbage companies.
Maybe projects like this will change the math. I think if they targeted commercial print specifications it would be quite interesting. The jump to larger format printers is so expensive.
I bought a toner printer in 2020 and I’m still on the first replacement cart. I have over 2000 pages printed.
Considering I spent $80, plus $40 on the new two pack of toner, I consider it money well spent.
I do wish I had bought a laser printer though… There are things I would like to begin printing that will be several thousand pages after it’s all finished. Mostly reference materials.DISREGRD THIS I DUMI’m confused, toner = laser. Toner is the media, it’s fine powder, applied to the paper via the drum and flash fused via a laser. Inkjet, liquid ink is the media, sprayed through a nozzle while moving back and forth.
reads manual
You’re only confused because I’m dumb! For some reason I was thinking toner and laser were separate types.
Does it still rat you out to the feds?
Oy vey.
That’s usually only an issue with color laser printers.
That is not true even a little bit. Look at any inkjet paper under a microscope made after the mid 2000s.
The roll of paper is an interesting idea but where would one actually buy those? Are they a standard thing?
It’s a thing. Print shops use these to print different formats, usually for size > office paper. I checked on DDG and could easily find a supplier in my country for sizes the fit the OpenPrinter. Not sure if the paper roll is cheaper or more convenient, given that you have to order from specialized stores, but certainly it’s a great idea.
The ink is DRM free, but proprietary paper rolls are available for the low low price of 3x the cost of a normal pack of A4
That would still be a massive win cost-wise lol
How they can say it’s DRM free ink if they use non refillable HP cartridges? Ok, the built-in DRM isn’t enforced, but HP has the worldwide exclusive in producing the cartridges, and its integrated printhead is literally the shittiest one you can find in the market. Yes, you can drill the tank and add ink, but that shitty printhead is not designed to last more than 1.5x the original life. And 100% of the “compatible” cartridges are refilled old ones, coming from ewaste, so they will break/clog even sooner.
If anyway they had to reverse engineer proprietary protocols to talk with the proprietary printhead, couldn’t they use the printhead of a $50 Epson? Way more reliable and at least it has 4 colors instead of tricolor for black.
Ps: if I remember right on the box of HP cartridges there’s some legal language like “licensed to be used only with approved HP® products”, so can they sell a product that uses such cartridge?
@Wispy2891
This is the main problem. The #OpenPrinter project is cool, but depending on HP cartridges breaks it. Unless the team has a source of ‘compatible’ cartridges which are not refilled HPs. Then, it depends on the price and quality of those.
@ardi60
