It sounds like you're contradicting yourself, and not seeing it because "old days were better".
> The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles.
These all sound like examples of
> someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin
What's being added sounds like just manufacturing ability, which comes with scale from increased demand.
If you don't want that to be possible, please stop saying "open source". Ideally, please stop saying "open" too.
Sorry - I guess I wasn't clear. These group orders or machine shops runs were often done at cost, or sometimes at expense to the person doing it. It was the nature of the hobby at the time. There were undoubtedly folks who would make a small profit off an order like this. To me, the meaningful difference was at the time the folks doing it were part of the community.
Deciding who is and who isn't part of the community sounds like anti-communal gatekeeping behavior -- and explicitly against the values of open source, no discrimination against persons or groups is a big deal for openness.
Imagine someone in the early days had been able to manufacture whole machines from scratch at decent prices. That would have probably been desirable, lots of people would have bought them.
You can be bitter about person putting a lot of effort into X not getting (enough) monetary compensation, but this line of thinking is in direct conflict with the communal "open source hardware" thinking.
> The first Prusa printers (before it was a company) were literally the RepRap standard design for a long time. We would do group orders for RAMPS boards. Someone would have a local machine shop make 50 nozzles.
These all sound like examples of
> someone who just takes the design and sells it for a thin margin
What's being added sounds like just manufacturing ability, which comes with scale from increased demand.
If you don't want that to be possible, please stop saying "open source". Ideally, please stop saying "open" too.