I only meant that it's not worth talking about in an economic context. At the rate it's progressing, it's not going to impact global economic stuff anytime soon (say the next five years).
I'm way more excited about lower-cost selective laser sintering (SLS) machines. This process yields high-quality (and high resolution) metal parts that most people would want to use in their daily lives. It's also something that we're not going to see out of the RepRap project in its current incarnation. SLS is startup territory. Current machines run something like $100,000, and anyone that figures out how to make this much cheaper without losing quality will do very well!
IMHO, you're missing the point. The RepRap project might not be economically interesting, but it might put technologies and capabilities into the hands of companies and entrepreneurs who will do economically (and socially, culturally, etc.) interesting things. As a comparison, Linux distributions, Linux kernel development, etc. aren't economically interesting or significant, but nobody in their right mind would claim that Linux hasn't had a huge effect on startups and on the entire tech industry.
Well, FreeBSD would have fit into the spot Linux took up if the legal matters (USL vs BSDi) involved were just a little different.
So I agree with the larger point, which is that something like RepRap (self-replicating, etc.) is interesting. But I'm not convinced that RepRap is that project.
That's my take. RepRap is enabling interesting activity. It will be great when something better comes along, but there's many people who can get use out of RepRap in the meantime.
I'm way more excited about lower-cost selective laser sintering (SLS) machines. This process yields high-quality (and high resolution) metal parts that most people would want to use in their daily lives. It's also something that we're not going to see out of the RepRap project in its current incarnation. SLS is startup territory. Current machines run something like $100,000, and anyone that figures out how to make this much cheaper without losing quality will do very well!