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Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#421

Post by hellweaver666 »

sleight42 wrote: post #403
cassianoleal wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prusa are pretty much plug and play these days, especially the Core One line-up. You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever. My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm…

How do you upgrade a Mk3 to a Core One?

You upgrade the Mk3 to a Mk3s, upgrade the Mk3S to the Mk4, upgrade the Mk4 to the Mk4s and the Mk4s to the Core One.

Prusa sell upgrade kits for each generation of printer.

If you were to do it all in one go it would require replacing the same components multiple times and would be insanely expensive and time consuming but if you upgrade as the product evolves its not a big deal (I recently upgraded my Mk4 to a Mk4s and I'll probably jump to the Core One in the coming year if I have some free time).

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#422

Post by imtringued »

abigail95 wrote: post #194
jrmg wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Techies like us get caught up in mechanism all the time in discussions like this. But, though there are some explicit laws where that’s how it works, that’s not generally how the legal system works. If I have a private server, and I don’t give you permission to access it - or, even better, tell you not to, it doesn’t really matter how I secure it. If you access it, you’re in the wrong. To give a physical analogy, it…

With no authentication it's a "gates down" scenario and it's assumed that if you put your server on the open internet you intend people to connect to it. With authentication it's "gates up" and then "without authorization" from CFAA kicks in. I think it's unlikely that a user agent string creates a "gates up" situation, especially not if it's from code granted under a permissive license.

I have a mailbox in a multi family home. The keys are numbered and standardized. There are identical mailboxes out there that have the same key as me. In fact, I had to buy a replacement key since the original key broke and I just had to tell the manufacturer which number my mailbox had.

My neighbor could in theory buy the key to my mailbox, but it would be illegal for him to actually open my mailbox and read my mail.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#423

Post by Ukv »

ricardobeat wrote: post #336
CarVac wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can bar people from accessing their servers if they do so by rewriting the entire slicer to be closed source and then implementing some actual security, instead of literally giving you the means of access AND the permission to use and modify it as you wish.

If I give you a template for a postcard, it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end. These are orthogonal concerns. They could very well enforce login for the entire app, that doesn’t require any closed source code and everyone would be worse off.

> it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end.

Given this was "a developer using upstream code verbatim", in your analogy "ricardobeat" would've been printed on the blank postcard by you, then you gave me the postcard with permission to use/modify/redistribute it. Plus it'd be a machine-readable field interpreted as "this postcard supports the same envelopes as ricardobeat's template", not something read by a third-party.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#424

Post by 4ggr0 »

techknight wrote: post #205

There are many valid criticisms one can make about Bambu Lab, but the constant overreactions to everything they do is so tiring. Somebody at their company saw a fork with their own company name on it, impersonating their own client auth code, and sent a C&D. The receiver of the C&D should see a lawyer about what changes or user-facing messages might get Bambu to back off. This is a normal, solvable business disagreem…

> The receiver of the C&D should see a lawyer

yeah, just get a lawyer! not like that's an expensive thing to do as an individual, private, open-source dev, at the risk of being stuck in a legal dispute versus a corporation with deep(er) pockets.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#425

Post by freedomben »

whimblepop wrote: post #109
xeromal wrote: post #38

I own a H2C and have been a huge fan of bambu for a few years, full disclosure. I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers. Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs. Someone reverse engineered the pl…

IANAL > Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer. The GPLv3 specifically was written to address a problem called "TiVo-ization", which is when a hardware vendor uses some trick (D…

> The Linux and proprietary drivers situation is more complicated, but proprietary drivers on Linux are generally restricted to interfaces that Linux chooses to expose to them for that purpose. But the Linux kernel seems to take a narrower view of what constitutes a derivative work than was likely intended by the FSF in writing the GPL. Under a "traditional" reading of the GPL, those proprietary drivers are meant to be illegal. Whether some or all of the linking done by proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel is really allowed by the GPL or not is somewhat untested, I think.

Is that why Linux sticks with GPLv2 instead of GPLv3?

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#426

Post by imtringued »

switchbak wrote: post #173
bityard wrote: post #163

I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change…

"you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry" - "only" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, this is easy for us, but that part alone is beyond most users. I have a P1S myself, and I find Bambu to be a strange company. They're one that has benefited tremendously from OSS while sometimes…

>They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network.

You have people in this very same HN submission complain that they want to send prints even if they are not in the same network. Their primary complaint is that Bambu Labs won't let them use their cloud in combination with OrcaSlicer. In other words, they like the Bamub Lab cloud, they want it, they think it is a good idea.

Basically, there are users begging for this feature.

You're the one underestimating the difficulty of setting up networking for the average non-technical user. Nobody is begging to have to setup tailscale, etc.

I have to setup video game servers myself and honestly it is such a pain in the ass even though I've done it hundreds of times by now.

Here is the problem: When it comes to networking, every home has a different level of connectivity and each home router has a completely different UI. Some people do not have an IPv4 address that can be used to make a server accessible on the public internet. They have CGNAT. It's the same deal with WebRTC. In theory WebRTC lets you do peer to peer connections between browsers. In practice there are STUN and TURN servers. TURN servers are basically the equivalent of Bambu Labs cloud for WebRTC. You perform an outgoing connection to an external server that has an IPv4 address with an open port.

Honestly, blame the sorry and user hostile state of networking. Decades have passed and we're all running into the same problems over and over again. If ISPs offered a standardized TURN/Tailscale equivalent, then connectivity could be guaranteed even in the absence of a cloud.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#427

Post by imtringued »

m4rtink wrote: post #292
miki123211 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention the fact that some people think of WiFi and cellular data as "things that give me access to the internet". The understanding of what a private IP address is and why it can't be reached from a cellular connection is just not there. Others want to control their IoT when they're not at home or not in WiFi range (they may not even notice the latter). You can do it with a VPN, or perhaps port forwarding if…

I've tried to download a model from MakerWorld and it told me I need to create an account first. That told me what I needed to know about that service & was not really surprising from Bambulab.

Considering the constant AI hammering these days are you really that surprised that everything is locked behind an account?

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#428

Post by [deleted] »

lukeschlather wrote: post #389
kube-system wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You must put authorization on your server if you don't want others connecting to it. Unfortunately, the CFAA doesn't necessarily require that authorization is implemented through technical means, and it definitely doesn't require any authorization to be technically robust.

The point is that they distributed AGPL licensed software which legally speaking puts them on very thin ice if they say "actually you're not allowed to modify that software we gave you and explicitly told you you could modify to do whatever you want." This is a direct quote from the Affero GPL: > When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent…

[deleted]

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#429

Post by redsocksfan45 »

jwr wrote: post #133
syntaxing wrote: post #54

Funny how fast people forget. LAN mode was NOT part of their original plan until outrage like this happened last time. They shifted their course and changed their blog post after. Putting pressure as a customer is how you steer company’s direction.

Also, LAN mode is NOT a substitute for the functionality you bought the printer with. My biggest annoyance is that I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely. I am still very annoyed at Bambu Labs for this stupid move, as it directly impacts my usage. What most people seem to be missing in these discussions is that some of us have printers in remote wor…

[dead]

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#430

Post by surajrmal »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #141

This sentence in Bambu Lab's blog post is wild: > We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users. So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING…

Why don't they implement per user quota instead? Or make it so third party applications don't need to interact with their servers?
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