>The price of the printers themselves would rise
>somewhat-to-significantly to offset the fact that the companies
>designing and producing them would no longer have ink as a profit
>center. A number of said companies would likely seek to be acquired by

It's interesting to see how this is starting to shape out in the 3d printing world, where the value add for "buy filament from us that only works in this printer" is "it can tell our proprietary software what it is, and so change feed rates/temperatures/etc"

--
-Pasha
"Don't change the subject"
"Too slow, already did."