““Just as James Watt refused to license his steam engine, suppressing the development of that technology over the quarter century that elapsed between his first commercial model and the expiry of his patents in 1800, the evolution of digital fabrication has been hobbled by practices aimed at securing a remunerative monopoly.30 During the period that Stratasys enforced its patents, the practice of 3D printing went more or less nowhere. It wasn’t until these patents began to expire, after twenty years of painfully slow progress, that the Cambrian explosion of depositional fabrication devices and things made with them became possible.31””
