I posted a comment over on Makers, Hackers, Artists and Engineers, the other day, with regard to Adafruit’s announcment of its Makerbot prominant 3D printing guide, but it was promptly deleted, and comments and resharing disabled… hmmm
I suspected something like this might happen so snapped a screen-shot after I posted.
I agree whole-heartedly with you.
I have seen adafruit take others ideas namely the IOT printer’s
Was going to order from Adafuit, but if they are siding with MB in all this, forget that noise. Maybe some Stratasys employees can order instead.
All in all I really admire Adafruit. They freely share a lot of code and in general are committed to open source and the maker movement. Their close relationship with Makerbot, considering recent events, seems to go against the grain. This is why it’s so disappointing to me.
@Justin_Shaw check this.
I posted a marginally critical comment the other day and it didn’t even last half an hour.
I don’t know what’s more offensive about Adafruit: aligning with MakerBot or censoring users criticism. I really am boycotting them and their products art this point.
They freely share code because it’s good business. Same way MakerBot freely shares Thingiverse.
Taken as a whole, Adafruit gives so much to the Open Hardware community. I guess I will have to overlook the MB fiasco.
@Justin_Shaw Adafruit is still a company, and regardless of its marketing, a company’s main goal is always to be profitable and to make money. Now, for Adafruit, their way of making money is by having a significant margin on products and marketing them at entry-level tinkerers that don’t know any better than to follow the tutorials Adafruit publishes. Adafruit is not helping out people out of charity, it is because they want to sell their products to them - and apparently, that model is what works for them.
And of course, any company will try to suppress critical voices against them, as those would shine a negative light on their actions and possibly impact sales. Removing a G+ comment really is just the easiest way to do that.
@Thomas_Sanladerer , those makers start out not “knowing any better”, but because of the quantity and quality of Adafruits turtorials, they quickly are given the tools to create their own products. This has enabled @WyoLum_Emergents_Ope
to create Open products that we could not have otherwise. We thank Adafruit for freely sharing the design and source code for all of their products. Think about it. If a tutorial saves me a single hour, its value to me is $100. They do not mark up that much.
