Not at all, do you not understand how customs works? What cause of action do you propose against the buyers? Do you not care about the law, you just want maximum retribution?
I wouldn't call that a win, though. I have a Bambu printer and it's very difficult to reproduce their tuning on open-source hardware or software. I think Klipper has vibration compensation now, but pressure advance and some other things require some tinkering and waste in order to set correctly, and you have to re-do them on any new nozzle/filament/temperature. Deciding nobody can have the software at all is completely opposite to the spirit of the license. "Yay, thanks to our challenge about this AGPL-licensed code, now even the binary is no longer available!" Sure, you can say it's harmful to the community to have features available without source code, but I wouldn't want the only alternative to be simply not having those features. (Anti-features are an exception)
As a buyer I'd be just as unhappy to be unable to get the hardware. I already have some, but if I wanted some new feature it doesn't have and that open-source definitely doesn't have, I'd be miffed to say the least if I couldn't get it just because Bambu didn't release the source code.
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.
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.
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
> and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source
But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.
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
They are quite good and typically better built (steel instead of plastic in lots of key places)
But they do not work as well out of the box. They require a lot more tuning and calibration. They also lack some quality of life features. For example, changing a nozzle on a bambu printer is a 15 second job. You just pop off the cover, hit the filament cutter, and the nozzle is magnetic. Changing it on a prusa core one is a few minutes and requires tools.
And on top of that, the prusa will cost considerably more and take longer to ship
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.
I would expect this to forcibly unlock the bootloaders of every Android phone sold in Germany (because the Linux kernel, used on all such phones, is GPLv2, and to replace it the bootloader must be unlocked, and tivoization means restriction of the right to replace it), yet as far as I know this is not the case.
So, what am I missing? Which specific German cases are you thinking about?
Steck vs AVM. But the bootloader on your phone is still locked because companies don't have to comply with the law until you sue them. If you live in Germany, you should sue them.
This would be a vindication of the SFC's position, which holds that what people commonly call "TiVoization" was in fact already not allowed by the GPLv2, and that the GPLv3 makes a slightly more complicated requirement.
Specifically, the SFC generally claims that the GPLv2 doesn't allow you to distribute hardware running GPLv2 software on it and then refuse to allow customers to modify or update this software themselves*.
Instead, they claim that what TiVo actually did that necessitated the creation of the GPLv3 is more complicated: you were perfectly well allowed to modify the Linux system on your TiVo box, BUT the proprietary TiVo software would thereafter refuse to run. Basically, you could either use the TiVo with only official TiVo software, OR you could use it as your own Linux PC, but NOT both.
According to the SFC, this is the only difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 in this area - if the functionality of the product you received is allowed to be degraded intentionally because of modifications you make under your GPL rights. Linux with its GPLv2 license allows this, but much of the GNU utils, with the GPLv3 license, don't at this time.
* unless the hardware itself is incapable of loading modified software, of course, such as the case where the software is burned into a ROM and no one can update it.
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.
Outrageous cartel then. For such amounts there would be plenty who would have intellectual chops to do the job, driving the price down. Legal costs are nowhere close to this outside the US.
This just means that there's pent up demand for litigation that is currently left unfulfilled because it's too expensive. Or, equivalently, many people think that they have been wronged and must simply take it, due to litigation being the only option to enforce that issue while litigation is too expensive to be affordable to them, or more expensive than the cost of the dispute (so, in effect, scamming people out of small dollar amounts is legal since the cost of enforcing one's legal rights may be in excess of the cost of the dispute).
Imagine what would happen if we made it cheaper, as happens very frequently when some other good or service becomes cheaper? Usually the provision/manufacture has some advancements that make it much more scalable, and often less involved, resulting in a lower cost, and sometimes but not always lower quality. So, for litigation? We'd get lower cost, via some more efficient¹ system², maybe lower quality depending on how we make that system more efficient and this may or may not matter in any particular case, and then those people who think that they've been wronged suddenly have an avenue to address it. Overall, this seems like a strong positive to me.
Now, what if people start enforcing frivolous legal rights? Repeal or reform the law that creates the right if it' s so bad. What about people dragging others into court in bad faith? Well, we just streamlined the bureaucracy and took a buzz-saw to the costs, so is it hard to defend against? Perhaps not. Making that perhaps a certain reality would be a good goal of such reform methods. We already allow people with more money and systemic literacy to bully people in this way, and this is a large part of litigiousness in our society now, so this strategy becoming ineffective may reduce it substantially and thus ironically make litigiousness less intense in at least some cases.
1: one proposal off the top of my head (so it may be terrible): sending written documents to a judge with LLMs helping lay people write and refine them, or a cheaper-than-a-litigation-lawyer expert human review service, perhaps, then the judge rules on their own schedule asynchronously for civil disputes without any heavy procedure to deal with.
2: another proposal is to remove law school/JD requirements to obtain a law license, but keeping a rigorous test in place and maybe some less-intense character/background checks, to lower the pay of lawyers
That is not meaningfully different to my estimation, since it is not test-only. Instead, you need to get accepted to an internship/apprenticeship, and then do that for a number of years, prior to having the law license. For gatekeeping purposes, this is functionally the same as requiring getting accepted into a law school and then doing that for a number of years prior to having the law license.
Lawyers fees for a case like that also include expenses, and this would be on the high side.
Court fees, fees for accessing case law, experts, paralegals, etc.
You pay the lawyer and a big portion of that goes towards his costs for additional labour and everything else. A lawyer grossing $2m/year isn't bringing home anything close to that.
That said $250k for a single lawyer for 6 weeks seems high.
I've only had to hire a lawyer once, and it was $2,500 to have them file a couple papers and speak to the judge once.
You're paying for their experience, just like an engineer - only it's often much higher stakes than a piece of software or product: your livelihood or freedom.
The reason engineers don't cost this much is that lawyers are lawyer brained smooth talking networking types who hold together tightly and have a quid pro quo system and you have to pay protection money to their mafia. Law is based on rubbing elbows in the right places, playing tennis and golf with the right people and in case of jury trials, on acting convincingly and exuding a certain image to manipulate their emotions. Engineers are too autistic to hold together end rent seek this much.
But some engineers do make that much. I say this as a fellow software engineer: why do so many of my colleagues think every other profession is worthless bullshit? BTW, statistically, SEs and Lawyers earn about the same...
The top of top frontier AI research talent maybe makes 2M and I'd guess you have at most a few hundred such people globally but maybe just a few dozen.
Non "FAANG" (or whatever the new term is) software engineers often make sub-100k even in the US. And regular sw engineers won't break above 500k unless they are managers heading some large team or branch. Getting over 1M is almost superstar level as a sw engineer. If you think it's common, you must be in a tiny SV bubble.
I said some, and pointed out that on average SE’s and lawyers get paid about the same. This conversation started on IP litigators, who generally have a BS degree in a related field and often times experience in the industry they practice, so yes they are amongst the best compensated.
Aside, but IP is a propaganda term. These laws are not property rights, their purposes are varied and usually have the wider public as the beneficiary in their reasoning for existing, it's not like ensuring right to actual property.
I can't find the source right now, but I believe punitive damages are excluded. So all you could collect would be actual damages. What are the actual damages Bambu owners have suffered?
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".
The article mentions reverse engineering the code.
But is there anything to stop reverse engineering the physical printer itself, improving on it by 10mm build volume in each direction, and releasing that?
It won't be a copy of the Bambu printer AND it can run the same software, truly freely.
Do you mean physically modifying a printer you bought from Bambu, and selling that on? Potentially as a service, where you buy in bulk and re-sell with this modification? If so, I don't see how that would change anything about the software you're allowed to run on it.
Or do you mean manufacturing your own printer that is a copy of theirs with 10mm extra build volume in each direction, and with your own software? That may be illegal if they have any patents, but otherwise should probably be ok, and would of course not have anything to do with their software - but you still couldn't take the software from one of their printers and running it on yours, most likely.
Any intellectual property (though they only get away with internal transgressions if their government approves).
Unfortunately that seems to increasingly be the status quo these days, look at US companies and their attitude to IP when it suits them to ignore licenses for LLM training purposes.
IP will only be respected if there is a mutually beneficial reason to do it. The US would need to offer China something they need in exchange for enforcing IP.
The US does not respect the EU's Protected Designation of Origin laws because they have more to gain by ignoring them. China has more to gain by ignoring US IP laws.
Shhh, don't point out the massive isomorphic plagiarism of GPL, markup user, and BSD licensed code.
People want to pretend LLM vector search compaction output isn't copyright and trademark violation. We are in the Napster phase of the market exploitation.
On a positive note there is nothing left of value to steal/scrape, so the problem will likely eventually be self-correcting. =3
Intellectual property is nothing more than a means of government-backed protectionism, alongside tariffs and embargoes. Any two countries that respect one anothers' claims of intellectual property do so by mutual agreement. No sovereign is entitled to unilaterally dictate the terms of trade with another, and that includes the exchange of ideas.
They literally raided and hijacked the whole Chinese Arm division and continued using all IP. Chinese don't care about theft really, "it's more like a suggestion" (c) Barbossa
> 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.
Why are you too stupid to get that the moment software binaries for the slicer are distributed is when they have to ship source code?
Next time read the AGPL instead of making smartass assumptions.
When the printer hardware is released "to the general public" or "backers" is entirely irrelevant...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I would expect a court to compell a defendant to either comply with the license or cease distribution and possibly pay damages for unauthorized distribution... But I don't know that there's a good way to figure the damages and US statuatory damages likely don't apply because who registers their copyrights for open source code (or deposits copies with the Library of Congress)?
Infringement by a rouge employee, acting against policy, may be reason to limit punitve damages and stick to actual damages... But if it's an actual rogue employee acting against policy, I would expect the company to cease infringement, begin compliance, or negotiate for an alternative solution once notified about the issue anyway.
I would expect that the defendant would already have stopped shipping anything that violates the license by the time it gets to court. However there is still the question of what the court will do about the part non compliance.
By contrast here the courts are likely to force bambu to open everything since they are knowingly not in compliance. Though China is what makes this hard- the courts can say open everything but if China resists there isn't much more they can do. (Blocking all sales is an option)
The person I am replying to is an obvious troll, but it is worth mentioning that there is very little to "test in court". Basic copyright law says that you cannot copy someone else's code and distribute software based thereon. *GPL* provides a workaround, provided that you follow the terms of the license. If a court were to invalidate all of AGPL, the default fallback would simply be that nobody is able to distribute the software.
Trolling requires subterfuge, in an effort to draw someone into a debate on false pretenses, so that they can be ridiculed for, as they say, eating the pasta.
My comment is and was completely sincere; I am not trolling. It legitimately boggles my mind how people read the text of the AGPL and don’t see that it’s plainly and obviously a EULA (which makes it nonfree).
I am not a lawyer but I’m not sure if that fail-closed situation is how it would work; presumably some parts of it could be found to be invalid without invalidating the entire license? It’s not my field, I am just guessing.
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.
The Bambu Labs mobile app doesn't work with LAN mode. I found this app for Android, "LanBu" which does a decent enough job. It's still in beta and wants to display ads. So far my PiHole has blocked all its ads so it's tolerable. I wouldn't mind paying for it, if it's a one-time free and it allowed access from outside my LAN.
If you can run a server at least for the duration of the print there is a home assistant plugin and a tool called bambuddy to monitor (but not slice and sent print job afaik)
I run this on the home server w/ caddy-tailscale, and I can slice/print from anywhere with a nice easily rememberable domain name. I run a P1S in LAN mode and have it firewalled from actual internet access.
I only sent one test print through Bambu so I can't make a comparison, but it's <10s from clicking print to the printer starting its warmup dance.
Speed is not why I set my printer up this way though. I live in a state that may ban 3D printers unless they include invasive surveillance, so I wanted to get a high end pre-ban printer in case that becomes law.
Is it possible to back out the firmware updates and setup that came along with this change to get self sufficient, or is that not necessary? I recall hearing that a firmware update made the printer (P1S in my case) phone home even potentially when in LAN mode. This is an area where I just kind of gave up and let it happen, though I kind of regret it now.
Oh shit, I didn’t realize that had been cracked. Nice, I’m gonna switch ASAP.
I bought a P2S, and then literally a few days later, the X2D came out. Thanks Microcenter, and your excellent customer service and return policy. The X2D is everything the P2S is, but with another nozzle.
This part gives me hope, but I have not been able to find the certificate:
Option B: cloud mode without Developer Mode
Starting with v2.0.0 the plugin can also drive a cloud-paired printer with verification left ON — no Developer Mode. This keeps the cloud features (cloud print dispatch, print history, MakerWorld) but is meant for advanced users, because it requires private slicer credentials that this project does not distribute.
Two things are needed:
1. Bambu's slicer credentials, which you provide yourself. Put slicer_cert.pem, slicer_key.pem and slicer_crl.pem in the plugin's config directory (or point at them with slicer_cert_pem / slicer_key_pem / slicer_crl_pem in obn.conf). The plugin uses the key to sign MQTT print commands and to install its app certificate on the printer. These are private credentials. This project does not ship them and gives no instructions on obtaining them — you have to find or extract them yourself, and you alone are responsible for ensuring your use complies with the applicable terms and law.
2. Two settings in obn.conf. Set block_cloud = 0 (the default 1 blocks cloud printing outright) and client_name = BambuStudio (the honest default client name is rejected by the cloud print API with HTTP 403).
With that in place you get signed MQTT commands, on-printer app-certificate install, cloud print dispatch, print history and MakerWorld — without touching Developer Mode.
What the default cloud_print = cloud_only actually uploads. Even in this mode the model itself normally stays on your network: for a print with a cloud record the plugin sends the .3mf straight to the printer over LAN FTPS, and only the record goes to Bambu — a project entry, a task entry (mode=lan_file) and a small config .3mf that print history uses for its thumbnails. That record is exactly what buys you the cloud extras: print history in Studio and Handy, and the ability to rate models on MakerWorld. The full model is uploaded to Bambu's servers only when Studio dispatches a pure cloud print (start_print), e.g. for a printer that is not reachable on your LAN.
You can limit even that: set cloud_print = try_lan_first or lan_only to print over the LAN without writing a cloud record at all, and cloud_hide_history = 1 to hide the cloud print history in Studio.
If you run neither Developer Mode nor valid credentials, the printer rejects every print / project_file command and shows on its screen:
To be clear for anyone else reading: those are the official options. But there are plenty of alternatives that allow for using a Bambu remotely. It just won't be quite as polished an experience as finding a model in Handy and hitting print.
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.
Or they can pay statutory maximum copyright violations of $120000 per copy violated.
Per copy.
Any import block would be on the hardware, not the software. And the software would need to be released for other territories anyway.
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.
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
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.
But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.
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.
But they do not work as well out of the box. They require a lot more tuning and calibration. They also lack some quality of life features. For example, changing a nozzle on a bambu printer is a 15 second job. You just pop off the cover, hit the filament cutter, and the nozzle is magnetic. Changing it on a prusa core one is a few minutes and requires tools.
And on top of that, the prusa will cost considerably more and take longer to ship
Unless it randomly blocks itself.... I spend so much time on that shit
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.
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.
So, what am I missing? Which specific German cases are you thinking about?
This would be a vindication of the SFC's position, which holds that what people commonly call "TiVoization" was in fact already not allowed by the GPLv2, and that the GPLv3 makes a slightly more complicated requirement.
Specifically, the SFC generally claims that the GPLv2 doesn't allow you to distribute hardware running GPLv2 software on it and then refuse to allow customers to modify or update this software themselves*.
Instead, they claim that what TiVo actually did that necessitated the creation of the GPLv3 is more complicated: you were perfectly well allowed to modify the Linux system on your TiVo box, BUT the proprietary TiVo software would thereafter refuse to run. Basically, you could either use the TiVo with only official TiVo software, OR you could use it as your own Linux PC, but NOT both.
According to the SFC, this is the only difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 in this area - if the functionality of the product you received is allowed to be degraded intentionally because of modifications you make under your GPL rights. Linux with its GPLv2 license allows this, but much of the GNU utils, with the GPLv3 license, don't at this time.
* unless the hardware itself is incapable of loading modified software, of course, such as the case where the software is burned into a ROM and no one can update it.
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...
Imagine what would happen if we made it cheaper, as happens very frequently when some other good or service becomes cheaper? Usually the provision/manufacture has some advancements that make it much more scalable, and often less involved, resulting in a lower cost, and sometimes but not always lower quality. So, for litigation? We'd get lower cost, via some more efficient¹ system², maybe lower quality depending on how we make that system more efficient and this may or may not matter in any particular case, and then those people who think that they've been wronged suddenly have an avenue to address it. Overall, this seems like a strong positive to me.
Now, what if people start enforcing frivolous legal rights? Repeal or reform the law that creates the right if it' s so bad. What about people dragging others into court in bad faith? Well, we just streamlined the bureaucracy and took a buzz-saw to the costs, so is it hard to defend against? Perhaps not. Making that perhaps a certain reality would be a good goal of such reform methods. We already allow people with more money and systemic literacy to bully people in this way, and this is a large part of litigiousness in our society now, so this strategy becoming ineffective may reduce it substantially and thus ironically make litigiousness less intense in at least some cases.
1: one proposal off the top of my head (so it may be terrible): sending written documents to a judge with LLMs helping lay people write and refine them, or a cheaper-than-a-litigation-lawyer expert human review service, perhaps, then the judge rules on their own schedule asynchronously for civil disputes without any heavy procedure to deal with.
2: another proposal is to remove law school/JD requirements to obtain a law license, but keeping a rigorous test in place and maybe some less-intense character/background checks, to lower the pay of lawyers
This does exist, but has become less common over time instead of more common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law
It is for the UK but no doubt m'learned friends in the US can command even higher fees.
Try grabbing a KC for five days, civil/commercial with all the trimmings. That will set you back £105,000.
Obviously the impoverished KC won't pocket all that lolly. There is VAT to pay and staff costs and stuff.
A KC is one of these: https://kcappointments.org/ for obvious reasons they used to known as QCs
Court fees, fees for accessing case law, experts, paralegals, etc.
You pay the lawyer and a big portion of that goes towards his costs for additional labour and everything else. A lawyer grossing $2m/year isn't bringing home anything close to that.
That said $250k for a single lawyer for 6 weeks seems high.
You're paying for their experience, just like an engineer - only it's often much higher stakes than a piece of software or product: your livelihood or freedom.
Non "FAANG" (or whatever the new term is) software engineers often make sub-100k even in the US. And regular sw engineers won't break above 500k unless they are managers heading some large team or branch. Getting over 1M is almost superstar level as a sw engineer. If you think it's common, you must be in a tiny SV bubble.
https://www.internationaldisputeresolutionlaw.com/2025/06/en...
I can't find the source right now, but I believe punitive damages are excluded. So all you could collect would be actual damages. What are the actual damages Bambu owners have suffered?
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.
https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-administration-continues-be-...
But is there anything to stop reverse engineering the physical printer itself, improving on it by 10mm build volume in each direction, and releasing that?
It won't be a copy of the Bambu printer AND it can run the same software, truly freely.
Or do you mean manufacturing your own printer that is a copy of theirs with 10mm extra build volume in each direction, and with your own software? That may be illegal if they have any patents, but otherwise should probably be ok, and would of course not have anything to do with their software - but you still couldn't take the software from one of their printers and running it on yours, most likely.
It just seems like they don't have that much of a moat which is why they are guarding the software bit as much as they can.
There is no way to stop it beyond getting CBP to block imports, which effectively amounts to shunning.
Unfortunately that seems to increasingly be the status quo these days, look at US companies and their attitude to IP when it suits them to ignore licenses for LLM training purposes.
The US does not respect the EU's Protected Designation of Origin laws because they have more to gain by ignoring them. China has more to gain by ignoring US IP laws.
People want to pretend LLM vector search compaction output isn't copyright and trademark violation. We are in the Napster phase of the market exploitation.
On a positive note there is nothing left of value to steal/scrape, so the problem will likely eventually be self-correcting. =3
Guess how China got their membership in WTO ?
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.
* 2022-05-29: Admitted it's based on PrusaSlicer [https://blog.bambulab.com/to-open-or-not-to-open-that-is-the...](https://blog.bambulab.com/to-open-or-not-to-open-that-is-the...) * "We would like to ask for the understanding of the community to give us some time *before we open-source* Parts 1 and 2, which is scheduled for the second half of this year." - admitted it's currently an AGPL violation
* 2022-06-29: Evidence. "GPL requires release of source the moment binaries are out. Many people have had the binaries for weeks. They are 100% in violation". [https://x.com/DreadMakerAdam/status/1542216014984876036](https://x.com/DreadMakerAdam/status/1542216014984876036)
* ???
* 2022-07-15: They only dumped it (with prior git history squashed) onto GitHub months after the initial release, after immense community pressure. [https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBambu/comments/1thfslw/comment/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBambu/comments/1thfslw/comment/...) [https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/1](https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/1)
I don’t think you understand how Kickstarter works.
The product ships after the kickstarter ends, not the moment it begins. They had the source code available around the time it was shipping.
> 2022-05-29: Admitted it's based on PrusaSlicer [https://blog.bambulab.com/to-open-or-not-to-open-that-is-the...](https://blog.bambulab.com/to-open-or-not-to-open-that-is-the...) * "We would like to ask for the understanding of the community to give us some time before we open-source Parts 1 and 2, which is scheduled for the second half of this year." - admitted it's currently an AGPL violation
That date is still before the printers shipped. There was never any question about it being based on PrusaSlicer.
> 2022-07-15: They only dumped it (with prior git history squashed) onto GitHub months after the initial release, after immense community pressure
July 2022 is when the printers shipped.
Why are you quoting 3 month old Reddit posts as supporting evidence when they’re just regurgitating the same content as the LWN article?
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.
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.
I would expect a court to compell a defendant to either comply with the license or cease distribution and possibly pay damages for unauthorized distribution... But I don't know that there's a good way to figure the damages and US statuatory damages likely don't apply because who registers their copyrights for open source code (or deposits copies with the Library of Congress)?
Infringement by a rouge employee, acting against policy, may be reason to limit punitve damages and stick to actual damages... But if it's an actual rogue employee acting against policy, I would expect the company to cease infringement, begin compliance, or negotiate for an alternative solution once notified about the issue anyway.
By contrast here the courts are likely to force bambu to open everything since they are knowingly not in compliance. Though China is what makes this hard- the courts can say open everything but if China resists there isn't much more they can do. (Blocking all sales is an option)
My comment is and was completely sincere; I am not trolling. It legitimately boggles my mind how people read the text of the AGPL and don’t see that it’s plainly and obviously a EULA (which makes it nonfree).
I’ve even written about it before: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/
I am not a lawyer but I’m not sure if that fail-closed situation is how it would work; presumably some parts of it could be found to be invalid without invalidating the entire license? It’s not my field, I am just guessing.
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.
It's excellent for monitoring and setting up automations around printer events, I use it all the time too.
https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-orcaslicer
https://bambuddy.cool/
Speed is not why I set my printer up this way though. I live in a state that may ban 3D printers unless they include invasive surveillance, so I wanted to get a high end pre-ban printer in case that becomes law.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/we-can-still-stop-cali...
I bought a P2S, and then literally a few days later, the X2D came out. Thanks Microcenter, and your excellent customer service and return policy. The X2D is everything the P2S is, but with another nozzle.
Option B: cloud mode without Developer Mode
Starting with v2.0.0 the plugin can also drive a cloud-paired printer with verification left ON — no Developer Mode. This keeps the cloud features (cloud print dispatch, print history, MakerWorld) but is meant for advanced users, because it requires private slicer credentials that this project does not distribute.
Two things are needed:
1. Bambu's slicer credentials, which you provide yourself. Put slicer_cert.pem, slicer_key.pem and slicer_crl.pem in the plugin's config directory (or point at them with slicer_cert_pem / slicer_key_pem / slicer_crl_pem in obn.conf). The plugin uses the key to sign MQTT print commands and to install its app certificate on the printer. These are private credentials. This project does not ship them and gives no instructions on obtaining them — you have to find or extract them yourself, and you alone are responsible for ensuring your use complies with the applicable terms and law.
2. Two settings in obn.conf. Set block_cloud = 0 (the default 1 blocks cloud printing outright) and client_name = BambuStudio (the honest default client name is rejected by the cloud print API with HTTP 403).
With that in place you get signed MQTT commands, on-printer app-certificate install, cloud print dispatch, print history and MakerWorld — without touching Developer Mode.
What the default cloud_print = cloud_only actually uploads. Even in this mode the model itself normally stays on your network: for a print with a cloud record the plugin sends the .3mf straight to the printer over LAN FTPS, and only the record goes to Bambu — a project entry, a task entry (mode=lan_file) and a small config .3mf that print history uses for its thumbnails. That record is exactly what buys you the cloud extras: print history in Studio and Handy, and the ability to rate models on MakerWorld. The full model is uploaded to Bambu's servers only when Studio dispatches a pure cloud print (start_print), e.g. for a printer that is not reachable on your LAN.
You can limit even that: set cloud_print = try_lan_first or lan_only to print over the LAN without writing a cloud record at all, and cloud_hide_history = 1 to hide the cloud print history in Studio.
If you run neither Developer Mode nor valid credentials, the printer rejects every print / project_file command and shows on its screen:
MQTT Command verification failed err_code: 84033543
If you want to feed all your print activity to Bambu's servers anyway, why bother using an open source plugin in the first place?
Without the networking plugin you cannot monitor your printer or send prints to it remotely. You can copy files to a flash drive and print that way.