The "proprietary aspects" of a tiny stepper driven extruder are less than trivial to the company that created the first mass market laser printer. You can't fight gorillas with gorilla-ness when you're lemur sized.
The primary asset Makerbot has is the community. Its fine to polish the product to make it more useful to those less skilled, but lock the community out of the product by closing up the software and its over. That is exactly the advantage someone like HP needs. Theirs is going to be just as good or better eventually with or without Makerbot's suuuper secrets. In the end, the only differentiator will be community.
True, but I tend to believe that the makeup of the community is a dynamic thing; it's going to change over time.
To start with, it might be a few of the hard-core early adopter, hacker types that will help develop the product, but it will eventually move away from that and become more a straight consumer community. (That's my guess, any way).
For instance, my dad will probably buy one and use it a fair bit for various projects, but he's not at all someone who'd give anything back to the "community", other than his cash.
And while it is the initial "hacker" community that will give it some momentum and critical mass, it's the "cash paying user" community that will really drive development forward.
The fact that some users don't want to contribute to community doesn't mean it's not worth having it be open. You can still cater to consumers without closing your product to hackers.
The primary asset Makerbot has is the community. Its fine to polish the product to make it more useful to those less skilled, but lock the community out of the product by closing up the software and its over. That is exactly the advantage someone like HP needs. Theirs is going to be just as good or better eventually with or without Makerbot's suuuper secrets. In the end, the only differentiator will be community.