Cannot agree more with Josef on how dangerous this is for our intellectual property; Of course there laws and mechanisms in China for the government to obtain any information retained by their companies under any possible justification, but the US does so, and thanks to the Cloud Act they can simply decide to do the same with any of the big players sitting in their territory (even to servers located out of their territory).
So, taking into account >80% of European companies rely either on Amazon, Microsoft or Google to store all their most private and business sensitive data, is this any different from all the data we are possibly leaking already? Same with AI, same with the phones and payment systems we use on a daily basis...
Sometimes I just have the impression that this has nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property but rather with finding an enemy and focus on that while pretending everything else is fine... and a blogpost from the owner of Prusa Research talking about their main competitor is a good demonstration of that.
I would like some precedents, to see if AGPL is actually enforceable. Many licenses put several demands on user, but are some parts are void and illegal. Like OEM licenses for MS Windows, that forbit reselling.
License can not order someone to publish something. They may not have a rights to publish code, or it was created as part of employment...
It's become rather clear that Open source licenses are vulnerable, since defending them costs large amount of money, and proving violations can be hard since by definition the products that break them are closed-source.
Its a chinese company. They don't give a single flying fuck. Nor do almost all consumers as long as the product is good. And no western government is gonna care because we let ourselves become so dependent on cheap chinese manufacturing.
Western courts have a different perspective since they pretty much universally don't have the larger issue of the Chinese manufacturing as a consideration.
Which is to day you can go to any western court and have import stopped at the border.
> The AGPL is a license. A license without a viable enforcement path is, in practice, a suggestion.
This isn't only a "The distant land of China hasn't been conquered by RMS" problem. The AGPL just isn't very good.
> You don't get to keep the copyleft piece closed by moving it across a function call boundary and calling it a separate work.
You can repeat that however many times you want, it doesn't make it true.
Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately. You can make plugin interfaces and "evil proprietary plugins" all you want. The license has nothing to say about either of those.
The only thing you can't do is ship both the (A)GPL'd software and the "evil proprietary plugin" combined.
Which reduces the problem down to "is Bambu doing that"? Given the installer is 300 megabytes, it probably contains both the application and the plugin, but you go launch an international lawsuit over "probably".
The only thing Bambu would have to do is swap their installer for a network installer that downloads both components separately, and they're in the clear.
> Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately
Of course they can. The nature of any software license boils down to "this work is protected by copyright. If you comply to A, B and C, you can do D, E and F that otherwise would have violated copyright law". A, B and C can be whatever you want. It can be "don't use this in nuclear power plants" (MS likes that condition), it can be "if you make less than $100k anually" (Unity etc), or it can be "if you share the source code" (copyleft). You can make that clause as wide or unrelated as you want
The real issue with GPL and AGPL is how badly defined the boundary is unless you have a single compiled C program
> Which reduces the problem down to "is Bambu doing that"? Given the installer is 300 megabytes, it probably contains both the application and the plugin, but you go launch an international lawsuit over "probably".
No, the plugin is downloaded at runtime on first launch
The amount of outright obfuscation with this issue is absurd. Either many of the big names that have jumped on the bandwagon are credulous idiots or deliberately misrepresenting what has happened for their own gain.
Cannot agree more with Josef on how dangerous this is for our intellectual property; Of course there laws and mechanisms in China for the government to obtain any information retained by their companies under any possible justification, but the US does so, and thanks to the Cloud Act they can simply decide to do the same with any of the big players sitting in their territory (even to servers located out of their territory).
So, taking into account >80% of European companies rely either on Amazon, Microsoft or Google to store all their most private and business sensitive data, is this any different from all the data we are possibly leaking already? Same with AI, same with the phones and payment systems we use on a daily basis...
Sometimes I just have the impression that this has nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property but rather with finding an enemy and focus on that while pretending everything else is fine... and a blogpost from the owner of Prusa Research talking about their main competitor is a good demonstration of that.
Your cloud act is making American cloud vendors lose customers in droves
I would like some precedents, to see if AGPL is actually enforceable. Many licenses put several demands on user, but are some parts are void and illegal. Like OEM licenses for MS Windows, that forbit reselling.
License can not order someone to publish something. They may not have a rights to publish code, or it was created as part of employment...
It's become rather clear that Open source licenses are vulnerable, since defending them costs large amount of money, and proving violations can be hard since by definition the products that break them are closed-source.
Software Freedom Conservancy is at least fighting back.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...
Its a chinese company. They don't give a single flying fuck. Nor do almost all consumers as long as the product is good. And no western government is gonna care because we let ourselves become so dependent on cheap chinese manufacturing.
Western courts have a different perspective since they pretty much universally don't have the larger issue of the Chinese manufacturing as a consideration.
Which is to day you can go to any western court and have import stopped at the border.
Kind of love the irony of this being an xcancel link
> The AGPL is a license. A license without a viable enforcement path is, in practice, a suggestion.
This isn't only a "The distant land of China hasn't been conquered by RMS" problem. The AGPL just isn't very good.
> You don't get to keep the copyleft piece closed by moving it across a function call boundary and calling it a separate work.
You can repeat that however many times you want, it doesn't make it true.
Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately. You can make plugin interfaces and "evil proprietary plugins" all you want. The license has nothing to say about either of those.
The only thing you can't do is ship both the (A)GPL'd software and the "evil proprietary plugin" combined.
Which reduces the problem down to "is Bambu doing that"? Given the installer is 300 megabytes, it probably contains both the application and the plugin, but you go launch an international lawsuit over "probably".
The only thing Bambu would have to do is swap their installer for a network installer that downloads both components separately, and they're in the clear.
> Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately
Of course they can. The nature of any software license boils down to "this work is protected by copyright. If you comply to A, B and C, you can do D, E and F that otherwise would have violated copyright law". A, B and C can be whatever you want. It can be "don't use this in nuclear power plants" (MS likes that condition), it can be "if you make less than $100k anually" (Unity etc), or it can be "if you share the source code" (copyleft). You can make that clause as wide or unrelated as you want
The real issue with GPL and AGPL is how badly defined the boundary is unless you have a single compiled C program
> Which reduces the problem down to "is Bambu doing that"? Given the installer is 300 megabytes, it probably contains both the application and the plugin, but you go launch an international lawsuit over "probably".
No, the plugin is downloaded at runtime on first launch
The amount of outright obfuscation with this issue is absurd. Either many of the big names that have jumped on the bandwagon are credulous idiots or deliberately misrepresenting what has happened for their own gain.