An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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