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An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

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Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#81

Post by ChickeNES »

m4rtink wrote: post #78
dofm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mac…

Yeah - we have 4 printers at the moment, one of them a Prusa MK3S+ & it has been maintenance free so far. The other printers are basically custom designs by this point & you need to fix things sometimes - like recently erosion of the filament eationg away enough of the idler arm to slip from the forwarding wheel. But I don't mind, because I can easily fix all of that with either 3D printed bits or easily & cheaply av…

> Seriously, would rather fix the 3D printer after every print than to deal with the level of bulshit common on 2D printers - and ot seems to me that Bambu is trying to achieve exactly that!

This is why hobby printers continue to be a time sink, while my Bambu just works. It's a tool, I shouldn't have to fix it after each use.

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#82

Post by hamdingers »

dgellow wrote: post #16

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

It's the networking plugin that talks to the printer over the network (while exporting gobs of telemetry to Bambu's servers).

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.

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#83

Post by herbst »

m4rtink wrote: post #66
herbst wrote: post #41

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…

Any reason why you did not choose a PRusa 3D printer ? From my experience those work well, are mucxh more open & don't do any of the stupid shit Bambu is trying to pull off.

Replacing my old ender with something that actually works was a relatively spontaneous thing for me. And as it's purely a hobby I looked for something price sensible but with multicolor support that I don't have to thinker with anymore.

Not sure if Bambu was already hated back then for stuff like this. At least not that much, it just wasn't super open sure.

At this point I get a new printer for free every few months because of makerworld and their weird point system, so until I actually do any business with it I have no real reason to change my platform right now.

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#84

Post by dspillett »

hrpnk wrote: post #42

What would the company need to do to comply with licensing? Release the studio, shared library, and server-side components as AGPL?

Perhaps not the server-side components, unless they directly link AGPL covered code there too. No one that I've seen seems to be asking for the server side parts, just the client parts so they can use the printers locally they way they want without hacking around.

Studio is fully release IIRC, it is that "external" part which is the issue.

The linkage between that and the client should be soft enough otherwise for the server side not to inherit the responsibilities of the client. Though if part of their claims attempting to defend their current position suggest that linkage is more direct, then they are taking aim at their own foot somewhat.

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#85

Post by ChickeNES »

bluGill wrote: post #32
sneak wrote: post #14

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 ensur…

You're talking about the GPL though, OP was talking the AGPL

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#86

Post by LoganDark »

spott wrote: post #44
LoganDark wrote: post #2

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.

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)

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#87

Post by jonhohle »

> At the same time, a parallel market in 3D printers for manufacturing was developing. These were printers that took up a whole room and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Machines that take up rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars existed a decade or more (probably 20 years, if I had to guess; patents) before hobby printers. I’ve not seen one retail printer that wasn’t based on the tech from giant commercial printers. And there is definitely tech in giant commercial printers that will never be retailized (laminated object manufacturing).

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#88

Post by throwaway219450 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #45
ramblurr wrote: post #28

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."

It's not worth engaging in the debate. People have complained that Prusa printers are expensive since forever, even when the MK3 was objectively superior to the alternative models. They would rather buy a $200 Ender and spend a lifetime tinkering with it.

Re: An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation

#90

Post by dspillett »

amazingamazing wrote: post #39

In the AI age do such things matter? I am surprised they have not reimplemented at this point.

You mean doing an AI based "clean room" reimplenentation? IIRC the jury is still out on the validity of that technique (though I expect it will turn out that the practise is not actionable as other similar decisions have gone that way), but even if that is deemed perfectly legal and would get them out of the requirement for future releases, they should still release the code for the versions that are subject to the license.
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