zlacker

It's not so much that it's hard, but rather so far just hasn't been worth it. The average small business owner / consumer spends what, $100-200 for a printer and maybe $100/year on consumables if they print a moderate amount? The pain point just isn't there compared to the 3D printing world in the pre-RepRap days of a little over a decade ago when a printer cost thousands of dollars and $100 in consumables in a week or less.

For something as inexpensive as 2D printers to really get some interest in the 'open' world, they'd probably need to start being as obnoxious as the mobile phone market. Think changing printer languages (i.e. PostScript and PCL) in backwards incompatible ways every year or two and requiring changes to 'new and improved' incompatible consumables (i.e. ink and paper) every so often while cutting off supply to existing customers of the old consumables well before the useful life of the printer has been reached.