Dragons_Blood,

1. Your post implies that makerbot will not use these patents to "profit by". Why have they not made a a public statement like that to clear up the confusion? There has been offers to help makebot protect themselves and the open source community at the same time with a RedHat like patent promise. http://www.redhat.com/footer/patent-promise.html
Apparently that is not something makerbot wants to do.

2. If makerbot only wants to protect itself from being locked out of using these designs is not a third option to put them in the public domain?

3. Are they playing good cop/bad cop? Letting their parent company do all the patent lawsuits. http://www.forbes.com/sites/rakeshsh...s-sued-afinia/ so historically it has been shown that makerbots new parent company will not just use patents for defense but also offense. We can only assume the same moving forward for makerbot.