201–210 of 247 posts
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.
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 her…
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 st…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 .…
Prusa's printers also worked out of the box. They cost slightly more, and their staff aren't volunteers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
GPL licenses are so much interpreted along lines of license intent that a German judge ruled GPLv2 software couldn't be Tivoized.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly what people engaged in surveillance capitalism is trying to achieve. Sell hardware/software at a loss, push out the competition that does things legitimately and then continue there engagement in profiling everyone for profit. I did a presentation[0] on this about a month back. If we want these situations to stop we need to work to inform the public and work towards getting people that care in positio…
These days power both corrupts and causes burnout.
No offense to LWN -- normally, your articles are well researched and well written, but, sheesh, this one was a total word salad. The full article is 2500 words. It could easily be trimmed by 50% with judicious editing. Literally, I needed to read 1000 (!) words to find this paragraph: > Bambu Studio would pop up a request to download "a little more stuff" with the classic choices of "Yes" or "Ask me later"; users eve…
Bambu Studio was open sourced on GitHub when the printers shipped to Kickstarter backers in 2022, not a year later after pressure from the community like he claims.
Bambu also has an open source page where you can download source for the GPL components in the firmware image, including the kernel. They quote a person who claims this isn’t available and he can’t find anyone to contact, but it’s the first result I see when I google “Bambu labs open source”. It took me 10 seconds to fact check.
I expect some minimal fact checking, not repetition of what someone said at a talk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Well they certainly bill at that rate, it goes some to the lawyer, some to rent, etc.
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.
> 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-li…
* 2022-05-23: KickStarter launch, distributing Bambu Studio binaries to every backer, reviewer and influencer *without source code*. They also sanitized the About dialog and removed any open-source attributions, AGPL disclosures, or links to the underlying PrusaSlicer/Slic3r code. [ https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/vnzpie/comment/ie... ]( https://www.reddit.com/r/BambuLab/comments/vnzpie/comment/ie... ) * 2…
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?
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.
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 her…
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.
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.