Our Commitment to Open Source

Open Source Isn't a Feature. It's the Whole Dang Point.

Most companies treat their designs as the crown jewels. The files are locked away, the manufacturing is a trade secret, and the entire business depends on you never being able to make the thing yourself. We built OpenSource EV Parts on the opposite premise. Every product we sell is published for anyone to download, and if you have a 3D printer you can make it yourself. That's not a marketing angle we bolted on. It's the foundation the whole company sits on, and it's right there in the name.

What "Open Source" Means Here

Every design we create is published on Printables for the community to download, print, inspect, modify, and share. If you own a 3D printer, or you have access to one at a local library, a makerspace, or a friend's garage, you can make any of our designs yourself for the cost of filament. No paywall, no license fee, no "premium files" upsell. The design is yours to use, improve, and pass along.

Then Why Would Anyone Buy From Us?

It's a fair question, and we get it a lot. The honest answer is that publishing the files and selling finished parts aren't in conflict, they serve different people, and sometimes the same person at different times.

Printing a part that actually holds up in a car is harder than it looks. ASA, the material we use, is notoriously fussy: it warps if your print environment isn't controlled, it needs an enclosure, and dialing in a clean, strong, dimensionally accurate part takes time and failed attempts most people don't want to pay for in wasted filament. When you buy a finished product from us, you're not paying for the design, that's freely available. You're paying for premium material, a tuned and tested print, quality control, packaging that protects the part in transit, and a one-year warranty backed by direct support from the owner.

Put simply: if you want to print it yourself, we hope you do, and we made that genuinely possible. If you'd rather have a finished, guaranteed part show up at your door, we're here for that too. Either way, the design belongs to the community.

A New Chapter: Moving to the Open Community License

For years, every design I've published, and there are more than thirty of them, went out under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. It served its purpose, but I was never fully happy with it. The "non-commercial" part is geared almost entirely toward personal use and, on paper, shuts out commercial users completely, even the ones who aren't selling anything. A print shop that wanted to run one of my parts on its own machine was technically offside. That never sat right with me. Sharing a design and then telling half the community they can't really use it is the opposite of the spirit I care about.

So we're changing it. Starting now, we're publishing under the Open Community License (OCL), a licensing framework created by Prusa Research. Version 1.0 was published in May 2026, followed shortly by version 1.1, which adds modular add-on conditions a designer can attach without changing the base license. Our newest model is the first design we've put out under OCL, and I'll be moving every design I've ever published over to it in the coming months.

The reason OCL fits us is right there in its name: it's built around the community. You can download the files, inspect them, learn from them, modify them, and share your modifications back to the community under the same license. You can use the designs, modified or not, in your own workshop or print farm. The one thing you can't do is turn around and sell the design files or remixes of them commercially without a separate agreement. In other words: use it, hack it, share it, print it for yourself freely, just don't resell the design out from under the community that made it. That's the balance the old Creative Commons license never struck, it either locked commercial users out entirely or, under other licenses, let anyone strip-mine a design and resell it with nothing owed back to the people who built it.

OCL fixes the exact problem I had. It's written in plain language, fits on a single page, and, unlike Creative Commons, it explicitly allows the everyday commercial use a real maker community depends on while still protecting the shared work at the heart of it. Josef Prusa wrote a thorough explanation of why the license exists and the real-world abuses it's meant to address, and it's worth your time: you can read it here.

To be precise about it: OCL is a community license, not an OSI-certified open-source license, and I'd rather tell you that plainly than blur the line. But it keeps our designs genuinely open for the things that matter, using them, improving them, and sharing them, while finally protecting the community's work from being strip-mined and resold. I think it's the right language at the right time, and I hope more designers adopt it too.

The Commitment Runs Deeper Than the Files

Publishing our designs is the visible part of open source. But we've tried to carry the same philosophy through the rest of how we operate, because a commitment you only honor when it's convenient isn't much of a commitment.

We're transitioning our production to Snapmaker U1 printers, which largely run on open-source, community-enhanced firmware. Think about what that means: the machines that manufacture your parts are themselves built on open, community-improved software rather than a locked proprietary stack. Our designs are open, our license keeps them open, and increasingly the hardware on our shop floor is open too. We don't just draw from the open-source world, we run on it, and we contribute back to it.

The move to Snapmaker U1 has also pulled us into another corner of the open-source world: multiACE, a community project that lets a Snapmaker U1 run multiple Anycubic ACE Pro filament changers for multi-material and multi-color printing, with no proprietary lock-in. It's exactly the kind of open, community-built tooling we believe in, so we pitch in where we can, testing releases and reporting bugs, supporting the developer financially, and supplying photos of our own cabling setup to help build out the project's documentation. We're not the ones writing the code, but keeping projects like this alive takes more than code, and we're glad to do our part.

And it runs the other direction too, back to the products themselves. Many of our designs exist because someone in the community had a great idea and we built it into a finished, supported product, with that designer credited by name on the page. That's the culture, not just the license: ideas flow both directions, credit gets shared, and the best designs rise because the whole community can see and improve them.

Why We Do It This Way

We could make more money by locking everything down. We know that. We chose not to because the Rivian owner community is exactly that, a community, and it gave us our start. The first product was one owner sharing one print on a forum because he thought other people might want it. Everything since has grown out of that same instinct.

Open source is our way of keeping faith with where we came from. It means that even if we disappeared tomorrow, every design we ever made would still be out there, downloadable, printable, and improvable by anyone who wants it. That permanence is the point. We're not trying to trap you inside our store. We're trying to make good parts, share them widely, and earn your business by being worth buying from, not by being the only option.