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A $4 Billion Empire Broke Open Source. They Threatened One Developer. It Backfired.
They took open-source code for free, then threatened the lone developer who actually followed the license. The Internet had other plans.
A 3D-printing giant vs. one coder after work.
One company owns close to a third of every 3D printer sold on Earth. It generates more than $250 million (ยฅ2 billion) in annual profit; it is run by a founder who used to ship drones; and millions of people trust it in their workshops.
On the other side stands one man who writes code in his spare time and gives it away for free.
The company sent its lawyers after the developer. They should have real enemies like counterfeiters stamping out fake machines, rivals cloning their hardware, but no, they chose the volunteer developer.
The threat used heavy words.
Impersonationโฆ
Unauthorized reverse engineeringโฆ
The company chose those words to scare the developer into taking his code down and giving up.
This is the story of a $4 billion company that took free code and built a business on it. It spent four years breaking the one conditionโฆ
