“Buy a Brother printer” was bound to only be good advice for so long. If I’ve learned anything from watching competitive tech markets, it’s that the best competitor eventually starts diluting their own offering in favor of profit.
My personal big suspicion is that the legally required anti-counterfeiting measures for printing (those near invisible yellow dots that color prints require) has prevented this from happening yet, but surely there must be some way.
I think the bigger issue is that printers are a commodity item in the public eye. Cheap and disposable, yet backed by thousands of hours of secret sauce engineering to achieve extremely high print quality.
Finding people willing to do that kind of work for free is very difficult, not to mention the fact that prototyping hardware is still very expensive, though it has come down in price dramatically over the years.
Though I also did find a few interesting links about people attempting to make FOSS printers earlier after getting inspired by this comment, which I share here now:
Honestly, that Open Tools one looks really interesting to me (it can be wall-mounted!!) but I can’t for the life of me figure out when the project was last updated to see if it’s currently active or defunct.
EDIT: Found a YouTube video by Open Tools. Uploaded Sep 23, 2025. Not beyond the realm of “still active,” but less than auspicious that there’s no newer videos.
That makes sense. Yeah, I’d love to see someone do that. If anyone ever turns up a project like that, even if it’s like five years after this comment was posted, feel free to share it here.
Time to make Open-Source laser printers. That is unacceptable. Even brother is pulling suspect bullshit now.
“Buy a Brother printer” was bound to only be good advice for so long. If I’ve learned anything from watching competitive tech markets, it’s that the best competitor eventually starts diluting their own offering in favor of profit.
I’m lucky enough that all I’ve gotta do is prevent my brother from connecting to the internet and I should be fine.
My personal big suspicion is that the legally required anti-counterfeiting measures for printing (those near invisible yellow dots that color prints require) has prevented this from happening yet, but surely there must be some way.
I think the bigger issue is that printers are a commodity item in the public eye. Cheap and disposable, yet backed by thousands of hours of secret sauce engineering to achieve extremely high print quality.
Finding people willing to do that kind of work for free is very difficult, not to mention the fact that prototyping hardware is still very expensive, though it has come down in price dramatically over the years.
That’s only required for color printers though. I’d be fine with a FOSS B/W printer. Gotta start somewhere!
As would I!
Though I also did find a few interesting links about people attempting to make FOSS printers earlier after getting inspired by this comment, which I share here now:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/open-tools/open-printer
https://hackaday.io/project/167446-diy-inkjet-printer
Also a discussion on open source printer firmware here: https://hackaday.io/page/6176-why-is-there-no-open-source-firmware-for-laser-or-inkjet-printers
Honestly, that Open Tools one looks really interesting to me (it can be wall-mounted!!) but I can’t for the life of me figure out when the project was last updated to see if it’s currently active or defunct.
EDIT: Found a YouTube video by Open Tools. Uploaded Sep 23, 2025. Not beyond the realm of “still active,” but less than auspicious that there’s no newer videos.
I actually had that printer in mind, but I wish there was an available FOSS laser printer.
That makes sense. Yeah, I’d love to see someone do that. If anyone ever turns up a project like that, even if it’s like five years after this comment was posted, feel free to share it here.
You won’t need me to. You’ll hear about the project lead’s assasination on a parking lot by HP on the news.