An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

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.

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 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.

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.)

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.

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.

After reading the article I don’t understand what the downloaded components are blocking in the slicer. What features aren’t available?

> 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.

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

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.

> 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 [email protected] 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.

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?

[dead]

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.

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.