For current owners who want to avoid Bambu's servers entirely, consider LAN mode with OrcaSlicer and this open source reverse engineered networking plugin: https://github.com/ClusterM/open-bamboo-networking
I have verified that my P2S in LAN mode never attempts to make external connections at all (blocked it anyway, of course) and OrcaSlicer + this plugin never attempts to connect to any of Bambu's servers.
My P2S is easily the best printer I've ever had, they really do make incredible machines, it's a shame they have created this ridiculous situation just to (as far as I can tell) collect telemetry.
LAN mode works well with home assistant and some HACS Bambu integration. Takes some setup but then you get real time camera feed and all the nice sensors for temp, humidity, including any AMS you have. I connected mine to Bambu server for the app just to see what it does, and my home assistant setup still works over LAN. Great printers and for now offline modes work well.
I think the Bambu case is a good one to litigate the AGPL but perhaps should start in the Court of International Trade. That court has the power to block imports as part of a TRO which would shut down a lot of their revenue from the US at least. Doing something similar in Europe would also help apply pressure. Takes lawyers and money though, of which there is certainly not enough of the latter.
Not to be too glib here, but its one of the paradoxes of "free software" which is there isn't any money generated by the licenses that keep it free. Where as "licensed" software has a revenue stream that is used to enforce the license against people who fail to honor it. The FSF can only do so much with their budget here.
The article says the SFC had a fundraiser and raised over $250,000 to hire a lawyer.
There's a confusing part of the article where he says that what he believes is a violation is something that a judge isn't going to care about. I don't know if he's implying that the judges aren't capable of interpreting the AGPL properly, or if he's admitting that the legal argument isn't as solid as they thought it was when they started. It's a confusing thing to say next to the broad claims about violations.
That confused me as well. I interpreted as judges not having (much) precedent and potentially unable/unwilling to interpret along lines of the license intent. But that’s what courts in this process are there for IMO. If a well written license and a good case, then you need to start somewhere to set precedent.
He is saying a judge will not care that they are technically a separate download. They only care if the end result is complying with the spirit of the license.
For background, I participated in a "small" action that Sun took against someone who was violating the Java license. The legal fees (in the late 90's) were 8.2 million dollars. $250K is nothing to sneeze at, its a solid 6 weeks of a single lawyer's time, maybe a couple of weeks for a small team. Against a company doing nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue[1] and owning 29% of the printer market? Add in a couple of expert witnesses which are essential to that sort of a case and you'll see that $250K isn't even table stakes. Sad, I know, but it is the way things are these days.
And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.
Some context on the US/WTO conflict. It started under Obama, blocking reappointment of two judges. Trump in term 1 went all in, stopping all appointments. When Biden was elected he fully maintained and supported the policy of blocking judges. So it has been more of a bipartisan policy than "Trump gutted".
I never used Windows, I never used Apple, I never used Adobe, I made my life harder than I needed to for my ideals...
Now I am old and have enough hobbies and want things that just work.
Got an iPad, and honestly most apps actually suck and cost monthly subscriptions plus app price, got a windows PC for music and it's horrible and full of ads.
But these 3d printers actually just work.
From a customer standpoint I can't blame them, it's sad that they can't be at least a little less evil
Bamboo has been sketch and proprietary since the beginning. It's such a shame to see the maker community get sucked in (though I guess there is precedence wrt Fusion et.al.)
It was really depressing when I realized that people will buy a sketchy product which is hurting the community and makers of non-sketchy products because "its cheaper and its not like my purchase is gonna change things one way or another."
It is selfish and short sighted, and it leaves their future impoverished, but in the moment they "got a good deal."
Is the product sketchy or just their practices from your point of view?
I think a valid view (not saying it's right) of this is: "some dorks in a country I don't inhabit gave away valuable code. I'm going to use it and I don't particularly care about what they think about it"
How much do you care about Chinese law? does that make you sketchy?
Some people like to use tools to make something possible/easy. Others like the tools themselves.
The Bambu printers, at the time of their release, were an incredibly superior pieces of hardware and software that was priced very very well and, this was a really big deal, worked fully right out of the box.
It was a pretty clear choice in either dicking around with the tools, or actually using the tool to make things. They caused a huge shift in the industry because it was silly to NOT buy a Bambu, if you wanted to actually make things.
I love open source software, but I also know that a team of focused, dedicated, high skill, engineers, who are financially motivated with big paychecks, to do well, will often do a better job making something proprietary than a bunch of volunteers doing it for fun, on the weekends. Ffs, we didn't get a half ass implementation (thanks to shite 8 bit boards everyone was using) of motion/vibration compensation in all the open source firmwares, a tech from the 1960's, until right before Bambu's release. It's still not available in most. Pressure compensation was still relatively new.
We just purchased a brand new top of the line Bambu with all the accessories, only for it to be defective on arrival. Their front panel display uses such thin fonts, it makes it almost impossible to read without glasses, and their error codes just send you in infinite loops that make you want to pull your hair out. They really spin themselves as the end all and be all to turn key professional 3d printing, and the reality has been anything but. We are currently waiting on a new part from China that will show up when whomever knows and at best, and all they could offer us a minor credit towards spending more money that doesn't even equal an hours pay.
I wish I could talk better about them, but what a let down. I really hope someone really figures out how to put the screws to them over this GPL violation.
That hasn’t been my experience, for me their software and hardware makes them the Apple of 3d printing. It’s something my mother could use, and everything works out of the box and is simple to maintain. The H2 series is awesome
I am not sure if that is actually the case. Everyone I know with anything else than a bambu still has regular maintenance, constant adjustment and failures. Bambu just works. Sure prusa are cool too, but much more expensive and still more maintenance.
I honestly don't want another maintenance hobby. I just want something that works and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
In defense of Prusa, I’ve had mine for six years and have done basically zero maintenance. I’ve adjusted temps a few times when switching filament brands, and that’s about it.
You are right to say Prusa is more of a hobbyist machine while Bambu is closer to a consumer appliance. But within the hobbyist spectrum Prusa is more on the light hobby side these days. My first printer was a Printrbot where I was hand-entering G-code to move the nozzle around and level the bed. Prusa is a dream compared to that.
I like Prusa as a company (and the guy), and I like the community around it. The machine is simple, keeps working, parts are available, and you can understand and repair it if you need to.
Depends on the niche and application you are interested in.
Though I would caveat my assertion by saying that if the specific form factor of the A1 Mini (which is a nice thing) matters to you, and it well might, there’s probably no alternative for that single machine, to be fair.
But I would still choose something else.
Personally I think the “just works” 3D printer is largely the result of cognitive bias. It’s a machine tool that melts plastic: I don’t think this is the appropriate territory for “just works”. But that’s just me.
> A 3D-printing user from Poland, Paweł Jarczak, reverse-engineered the User-Agent string and network code, which resulted in a DMCA takedown notice from Bambu Lab. "GitHub, of course, honored it, because Microsoft."
Which is somewhat funny because a lot of high-impact piracy stuff is on Github and has been for years. GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft) come to my mind.
> GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft)
It's questionable whether those two companies care that much about piracy, they make most of their money off enterprise, right? For a while I heard it theorized that Adobe and Microsoft largely let people get away with it, since it still keeps them in the ecosystem and therefore makes them likelier to use those products at work. Versus Bambu which probably still sells mainly to random hobbyists/home users
It's been pretty weird and disappointing to see the way Bambu has taken over with these practices.
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
Haven't these (A)GPL violations been there for most of the company's history? It's the context around them that changed.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
It's a shame because the Bambu product line is genuinely first class. They don't need to play these games to compete, and could have won a lot of genuine good will by giving a little back to the community.
> Kühn said; they often rely on mechanisms that an actual judge is not going to care about. In this case, Bambu Studio would pop up a request to download "a little more stuff" with the classic choices of "Yes" or "Ask me later"; users eventually figure out that some functionality in the slicer does not work until they click "Yes". The extras that are downloaded are two .so files built from C++ source. Those shared-library files are dynamically loaded into the slicer—as can plainly be seen from the dlopen() calls in the source code that was released.
This seems to be the main complaint: They ship a separate .so as a plugin.
Saying that an actual judge is not going to care about it is confusing. Is this or is it not consistent with the license? Why wouldn't a judge care about something that is a license violation? I don't get it.
> violating GPLv2 by not providing the source for a Buildroot-based Linux (and other copyleft components) used in the firmware of some 3D-printer models. He downloaded the 300MB firmware image from the Bambu Lab web site, but was unable to find the source or an offer to provide it.
Is there some other technicality that I'm missing?
> Bambu Lab needed a slicer, of course, so it started shipping a modified PrusaSlicer (as Bambu Studio), which it was able to get via the AGPLv3, but without shipping any source code or an offer to provide it. That continued up through 2022 or 2023, Kühn said, until the pressure from the 3D-printing community effectively forced Bambu Lab to make a source release, which was, as is almost always the case for a first release, not the actual corresponding source code.
I googled Bambu's first Kickstarter. It shows July 2022 as the estimated ship date.
So the repo was public and available around the time that the Kickstarter ended. Seems fair? He acts like they were refusing until the community forced them to do it a year later, but the repo was live and open when the printers shipped.
I get that Bambu is supposed to be the enemy and we're not supposed to defend the enemy unless we want a lot of downvotes, but the reporting on this issue seems lacking any fact checking. I didn't try very hard but found contradictory evidence in the first Google link for several of the claims. The article is quoting someone speaking from memory to an audience so mistakes are understandable, but I would at minimum expect some cursory fact checking for someone reporting on it.
Like JoshTriplett explains in other places in this thread, Kühn means that the judge will not care about Bambu Studio’s workarounds; i.e. that the judge will see through these as the tricks they are, and not allow Bambu Studio to get away with it.
I am gleeful at the idea that courts can't actually enforce open source compliance.
If your response is "Let's force TPP-style international trade courts to force AGPL compliance", well, you're the globalist that Bernie Sanders rightfully warned about and people like trump pretended/lied about being against as justification for why they get elected. I hope you never get what you want. The same crap will be used to patent surgical procedures and other IP in ways that are horrible for society.
You want to do fake software viral communism that's incompatible with how the legal system operates? You're poor as shit and can't hire good lawyers vs business because capitalism isn't favorable to you? That's why you're supposed to engineer something better than crapitalism. This is a grand challenge for the FOSS movement and why I am still broadly supportive of the reasons why someone like RMS votes/voted for the green party (and yes I know they are these days loony/crazy/compromised by the FSB)
Real FOSS is MIT. Learn to make your fake viral communist license have teeth or forever persist in this doomed world you have created.
FWIW the AGPL (which is a nonfree EULA trying to masquerade as a copyright license) has never been tested in court, so the fact that it is nonsensical has yet to actually be adjudicated.
Software and services aren’t the same, and the anticapitalist zealots at the FSF can’t square this circle no matter how hard they try.
Generally, when you ask people who have any understanding of law, they respond, well, of course not. No one with any sanity at all would try and test the GPL in court. They know what's going to hold up.
I do believe that the GPL will eventually be broken. However, it won't be broken in ways such as happening now. It'll be broken when some company is able to show the court that they were doing a lot of things to ensure they weren't going to violate the GPL. And yet a rogue employee, unknown to the rest of the company, violated it despite being told not to. I don't know exactly what the courts will decide in this case. It's still going to come down to the copyright violation. However, it likely won't be a source code release. The GPL will hold up, they will just say the written requirements are to much and ??? . But again, this will only happen after the courts take a very detailed look at all the things the company is doing to ensure they didn't violate the GPL in the first place, which means we are likely looking at many, many years before the first such case. Anyone who isn't aware of the GPL and taking a lot of active effort to ensure they're not violating it, they won't be able to pull off this defense after the fact.
Yup. IP abolitionism it turns out is a sword that can slay yourself too. I support abolishing it even to the point of making all EULA unenforceable for good.
It is so much worse than "just" AGPL, YouTube happened to rec this to me yesterday: https://youtu.be/mAm-kpiHRcw. Granted, there are much worse and more pressing evils in our world, but Bambu is just pure and utter evil.
For current owners who want to avoid Bambu's servers entirely, consider LAN mode with OrcaSlicer and this open source reverse engineered networking plugin: https://github.com/ClusterM/open-bamboo-networking
I have verified that my P2S in LAN mode never attempts to make external connections at all (blocked it anyway, of course) and OrcaSlicer + this plugin never attempts to connect to any of Bambu's servers.
My P2S is easily the best printer I've ever had, they really do make incredible machines, it's a shame they have created this ridiculous situation just to (as far as I can tell) collect telemetry.
I have several, and they're all running in DevMode/LAN Mode. I drive them using this project:
https://bambuddy.cool/
LAN mode works well with home assistant and some HACS Bambu integration. Takes some setup but then you get real time camera feed and all the nice sensors for temp, humidity, including any AMS you have. I connected mine to Bambu server for the app just to see what it does, and my home assistant setup still works over LAN. Great printers and for now offline modes work well.
2nd this, I have my X1C blocked on any inet access, LAN only, it’s a very nice piece of hardware with questionable software :/
I think the Bambu case is a good one to litigate the AGPL but perhaps should start in the Court of International Trade. That court has the power to block imports as part of a TRO which would shut down a lot of their revenue from the US at least. Doing something similar in Europe would also help apply pressure. Takes lawyers and money though, of which there is certainly not enough of the latter.
Not to be too glib here, but its one of the paradoxes of "free software" which is there isn't any money generated by the licenses that keep it free. Where as "licensed" software has a revenue stream that is used to enforce the license against people who fail to honor it. The FSF can only do so much with their budget here.
The article says the SFC had a fundraiser and raised over $250,000 to hire a lawyer.
There's a confusing part of the article where he says that what he believes is a violation is something that a judge isn't going to care about. I don't know if he's implying that the judges aren't capable of interpreting the AGPL properly, or if he's admitting that the legal argument isn't as solid as they thought it was when they started. It's a confusing thing to say next to the broad claims about violations.
I think he's saying the opposite: that "clever" attempts to work around the license aren't things a judge is going to appreciate.
That would make more sense. Thank you.
That confused me as well. I interpreted as judges not having (much) precedent and potentially unable/unwilling to interpret along lines of the license intent. But that’s what courts in this process are there for IMO. If a well written license and a good case, then you need to start somewhere to set precedent.
He is saying a judge will not care that they are technically a separate download. They only care if the end result is complying with the spirit of the license.
For background, I participated in a "small" action that Sun took against someone who was violating the Java license. The legal fees (in the late 90's) were 8.2 million dollars. $250K is nothing to sneeze at, its a solid 6 weeks of a single lawyer's time, maybe a couple of weeks for a small team. Against a company doing nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue[1] and owning 29% of the printer market? Add in a couple of expert witnesses which are essential to that sort of a case and you'll see that $250K isn't even table stakes. Sad, I know, but it is the way things are these days.
And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.
[1] "Media reports have also indicated that Bambu Lab has shipped more than 1.2 million units, claiming a 29% global share." -- https://kr-asia.com/bambu-lab-nears-usd-100-billion-valuatio...
> I think the Bambu case is a good one to litigate the AGPL but perhaps should start in the Court of International Trade.
IMHO that kind of stuff would have to go through the WTO but unfortunately Trump gutted that one already way back in his first term.
Some context on the US/WTO conflict. It started under Obama, blocking reappointment of two judges. Trump in term 1 went all in, stopping all appointments. When Biden was elected he fully maintained and supported the policy of blocking judges. So it has been more of a bipartisan policy than "Trump gutted".
https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-administration-continues-be-...
I never used Windows, I never used Apple, I never used Adobe, I made my life harder than I needed to for my ideals...
Now I am old and have enough hobbies and want things that just work.
Got an iPad, and honestly most apps actually suck and cost monthly subscriptions plus app price, got a windows PC for music and it's horrible and full of ads.
But these 3d printers actually just work.
From a customer standpoint I can't blame them, it's sad that they can't be at least a little less evil
The Chinese tech industry is built upon a foundation of GPL violations.
There is no way to stop it beyond getting CBP to block imports, which effectively amounts to shunning.
They built on a foundation of not respecting US intellectual property; copyright licenses were also ignored.
Bamboo has been sketch and proprietary since the beginning. It's such a shame to see the maker community get sucked in (though I guess there is precedence wrt Fusion et.al.)
It was really depressing when I realized that people will buy a sketchy product which is hurting the community and makers of non-sketchy products because "its cheaper and its not like my purchase is gonna change things one way or another."
It is selfish and short sighted, and it leaves their future impoverished, but in the moment they "got a good deal."
Is the product sketchy or just their practices from your point of view?
I think a valid view (not saying it's right) of this is: "some dorks in a country I don't inhabit gave away valuable code. I'm going to use it and I don't particularly care about what they think about it"
How much do you care about Chinese law? does that make you sketchy?
Some people like to use tools to make something possible/easy. Others like the tools themselves.
The Bambu printers, at the time of their release, were an incredibly superior pieces of hardware and software that was priced very very well and, this was a really big deal, worked fully right out of the box.
It was a pretty clear choice in either dicking around with the tools, or actually using the tool to make things. They caused a huge shift in the industry because it was silly to NOT buy a Bambu, if you wanted to actually make things.
I love open source software, but I also know that a team of focused, dedicated, high skill, engineers, who are financially motivated with big paychecks, to do well, will often do a better job making something proprietary than a bunch of volunteers doing it for fun, on the weekends. Ffs, we didn't get a half ass implementation (thanks to shite 8 bit boards everyone was using) of motion/vibration compensation in all the open source firmwares, a tech from the 1960's, until right before Bambu's release. It's still not available in most. Pressure compensation was still relatively new.
We just purchased a brand new top of the line Bambu with all the accessories, only for it to be defective on arrival. Their front panel display uses such thin fonts, it makes it almost impossible to read without glasses, and their error codes just send you in infinite loops that make you want to pull your hair out. They really spin themselves as the end all and be all to turn key professional 3d printing, and the reality has been anything but. We are currently waiting on a new part from China that will show up when whomever knows and at best, and all they could offer us a minor credit towards spending more money that doesn't even equal an hours pay.
I wish I could talk better about them, but what a let down. I really hope someone really figures out how to put the screws to them over this GPL violation.
That hasn’t been my experience, for me their software and hardware makes them the Apple of 3d printing. It’s something my mother could use, and everything works out of the box and is simple to maintain. The H2 series is awesome
Yeah, their devices simply worked and worked fine for us.
Same, it doesnt get much more plug and play as theirs
After reading the article I don’t understand what the downloaded components are blocking in the slicer. What features aren’t available?
What would the company need to do to comply with licensing? Release the studio, shared library, and server-side components as AGPL?
At this point there are so many alternatives that we should fully be into the “friends don’t let friends buy Bambu Labs products” but alas we are not.
It’s absolutely insane how little they would have to do to be good community members and choose not to.
I am not sure if that is actually the case. Everyone I know with anything else than a bambu still has regular maintenance, constant adjustment and failures. Bambu just works. Sure prusa are cool too, but much more expensive and still more maintenance.
I honestly don't want another maintenance hobby. I just want something that works and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
In defense of Prusa, I’ve had mine for six years and have done basically zero maintenance. I’ve adjusted temps a few times when switching filament brands, and that’s about it.
You are right to say Prusa is more of a hobbyist machine while Bambu is closer to a consumer appliance. But within the hobbyist spectrum Prusa is more on the light hobby side these days. My first printer was a Printrbot where I was hand-entering G-code to move the nozzle around and level the bed. Prusa is a dream compared to that.
I like Prusa as a company (and the guy), and I like the community around it. The machine is simple, keeps working, parts are available, and you can understand and repair it if you need to.
Prusa make machine tools, IMO.
(I don't understand people who build print farms from Bambu Lab machines at all; I do get using Prusas.)
Which alternatives?
Depends on the niche and application you are interested in.
Though I would caveat my assertion by saying that if the specific form factor of the A1 Mini (which is a nice thing) matters to you, and it well might, there’s probably no alternative for that single machine, to be fair.
But I would still choose something else.
Personally I think the “just works” 3D printer is largely the result of cognitive bias. It’s a machine tool that melts plastic: I don’t think this is the appropriate territory for “just works”. But that’s just me.
would be nice it one could block programs from loading libs based GPL blacklists. Also linking shoudl be prohibited.. I know it is not possible
In the AI age do such things matter? I am surprised they have not reimplemented at this point.
Which is better parrot or kali Linux? I think it's parrot
> A 3D-printing user from Poland, Paweł Jarczak, reverse-engineered the User-Agent string and network code, which resulted in a DMCA takedown notice from Bambu Lab. "GitHub, of course, honored it, because Microsoft."
Which is somewhat funny because a lot of high-impact piracy stuff is on Github and has been for years. GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft) come to my mind.
> GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft)
It's questionable whether those two companies care that much about piracy, they make most of their money off enterprise, right? For a while I heard it theorized that Adobe and Microsoft largely let people get away with it, since it still keeps them in the ecosystem and therefore makes them likelier to use those products at work. Versus Bambu which probably still sells mainly to random hobbyists/home users
It's been pretty weird and disappointing to see the way Bambu has taken over with these practices.
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
Haven't these (A)GPL violations been there for most of the company's history? It's the context around them that changed.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
> apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is it's meant to block this kind of behavior. Certainly it's against the spirit of it.
It's a shame because the Bambu product line is genuinely first class. They don't need to play these games to compete, and could have won a lot of genuine good will by giving a little back to the community.
Bambu and Prusa are both engaged in harm.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.
Is it even possible to sue a China-based company from the US? Would you even be able to seek any remedy other than banning import/sale of its product?
Banning import/sale of the product into the US is worth a hell of a lot.
Presumably they have _some_ assets in the USA
Sure block them.
Or they can pay statutory maximum copyright violations of $120000 per copy violated.
Per copy.
This sounds more like a wish?
They could sue amazon to get a list of Bambu buyers, then go after them.
> Kühn said; they often rely on mechanisms that an actual judge is not going to care about. In this case, Bambu Studio would pop up a request to download "a little more stuff" with the classic choices of "Yes" or "Ask me later"; users eventually figure out that some functionality in the slicer does not work until they click "Yes". The extras that are downloaded are two .so files built from C++ source. Those shared-library files are dynamically loaded into the slicer—as can plainly be seen from the dlopen() calls in the source code that was released.
This seems to be the main complaint: They ship a separate .so as a plugin.
Saying that an actual judge is not going to care about it is confusing. Is this or is it not consistent with the license? Why wouldn't a judge care about something that is a license violation? I don't get it.
> violating GPLv2 by not providing the source for a Buildroot-based Linux (and other copyleft components) used in the firmware of some 3D-printer models. He downloaded the 300MB firmware image from the Bambu Lab web site, but was unable to find the source or an offer to provide it.
This was the first hit when I googled it: https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/open-source-s.... Includes the e-mail address opensource@bambulab.com for requests
Is there some other technicality that I'm missing?
> Bambu Lab needed a slicer, of course, so it started shipping a modified PrusaSlicer (as Bambu Studio), which it was able to get via the AGPLv3, but without shipping any source code or an offer to provide it. That continued up through 2022 or 2023, Kühn said, until the pressure from the 3D-printing community effectively forced Bambu Lab to make a source release, which was, as is almost always the case for a first release, not the actual corresponding source code.
I googled Bambu's first Kickstarter. It shows July 2022 as the estimated ship date.
The BambuStudio repo has public issues from July 2022 with public user comments - https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/12
So the repo was public and available around the time that the Kickstarter ended. Seems fair? He acts like they were refusing until the community forced them to do it a year later, but the repo was live and open when the printers shipped.
I get that Bambu is supposed to be the enemy and we're not supposed to defend the enemy unless we want a lot of downvotes, but the reporting on this issue seems lacking any fact checking. I didn't try very hard but found contradictory evidence in the first Google link for several of the claims. The article is quoting someone speaking from memory to an audience so mistakes are understandable, but I would at minimum expect some cursory fact checking for someone reporting on it.
Like JoshTriplett explains in other places in this thread, Kühn means that the judge will not care about Bambu Studio’s workarounds; i.e. that the judge will see through these as the tricks they are, and not allow Bambu Studio to get away with it.
I am gleeful at the idea that courts can't actually enforce open source compliance.
If your response is "Let's force TPP-style international trade courts to force AGPL compliance", well, you're the globalist that Bernie Sanders rightfully warned about and people like trump pretended/lied about being against as justification for why they get elected. I hope you never get what you want. The same crap will be used to patent surgical procedures and other IP in ways that are horrible for society.
You want to do fake software viral communism that's incompatible with how the legal system operates? You're poor as shit and can't hire good lawyers vs business because capitalism isn't favorable to you? That's why you're supposed to engineer something better than crapitalism. This is a grand challenge for the FOSS movement and why I am still broadly supportive of the reasons why someone like RMS votes/voted for the green party (and yes I know they are these days loony/crazy/compromised by the FSB)
Real FOSS is MIT. Learn to make your fake viral communist license have teeth or forever persist in this doomed world you have created.
FWIW the AGPL (which is a nonfree EULA trying to masquerade as a copyright license) has never been tested in court, so the fact that it is nonsensical has yet to actually be adjudicated.
Software and services aren’t the same, and the anticapitalist zealots at the FSF can’t square this circle no matter how hard they try.
Generally, when you ask people who have any understanding of law, they respond, well, of course not. No one with any sanity at all would try and test the GPL in court. They know what's going to hold up.
I do believe that the GPL will eventually be broken. However, it won't be broken in ways such as happening now. It'll be broken when some company is able to show the court that they were doing a lot of things to ensure they weren't going to violate the GPL. And yet a rogue employee, unknown to the rest of the company, violated it despite being told not to. I don't know exactly what the courts will decide in this case. It's still going to come down to the copyright violation. However, it likely won't be a source code release. The GPL will hold up, they will just say the written requirements are to much and ??? . But again, this will only happen after the courts take a very detailed look at all the things the company is doing to ensure they didn't violate the GPL in the first place, which means we are likely looking at many, many years before the first such case. Anyone who isn't aware of the GPL and taking a lot of active effort to ensure they're not violating it, they won't be able to pull off this defense after the fact.
Yup. IP abolitionism it turns out is a sword that can slay yourself too. I support abolishing it even to the point of making all EULA unenforceable for good.
It is so much worse than "just" AGPL, YouTube happened to rec this to me yesterday: https://youtu.be/mAm-kpiHRcw. Granted, there are much worse and more pressing evils in our world, but Bambu is just pure and utter evil.