Secondly, it would appear to me that MakerBot, for example, is pretty blatantly infringing on the FDM patents that Stratasys has. Those are about to run out Real Soon Now, though, so they're probably fine.
Third, the industry has shaped up the way that it has because of patents. There's a reason there's 14 different ways to do 3D printing. Yeah, some are better at some things than others, but realistically, we'd really have like 3 or 4 processes if there were no patents to force new hardware companies to reinvent the wheel all the time.
The fact that there's pretty much a 1-1 mapping between companies and processes suggests that it's difficult to start a business in this area, due to the large amount of capital needed to invent a new way of doing things.
