Cosine Additive’s Twitter bio basically says it all:

Industrial grade open-platform additive manufacturing.

It’s 6 simple words, but in those brief words is a potential revolution. 3D printing to this point has been a buffet of standards, platforms, software, materials, etc.  With any new technology with dueling standards a certain segment of the customer population will sit on the sidelines and wait for a winner to emerge.  No one wants to be stuck with expensive, obsolete and unsupported technology.  In the case of 3D printing this could be no longer being able to get software updates or even get materials.

The team at Cosine Additive has gone a different route, an open source or as they term it, “open-platform”, route.  However, they haven’t just done this with a small consumer printer, they’ve gone BIG with a large scale industrial printer.  This is the opposite of the old “razor” principle where you basically give away the handle, but charge huge margins on the frequently replaced blades.  In 3D printing the “razor” equivalent here is filament.  Instead of selling proprietary filament on their site, Cosine instead says:

Cosine encourages customers to continue using their own material suppliers or utilize our list of vendors to develop new materials for industry specific applications. Cosine also supplies material upon request. While keeping a high repeat-ability rate is always paramount, by moving to open market materials we allow our customers to find the perfect balance between cost, material quality and customer service.

We’ll keep an eye on this one and for the long term good of the industry and more widespread adoption, we hope the “open-platform” concept takes off!  We also highly recommend you checkout this great piece about one of their engineers Maria Alejandra Mora-Sanchez designing an amazing 3D printed dress!