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BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork
- isoprophlex 5mo agoIts a chinese company. They don't give a single flying fuck. Nor do almost all consumers as long as the product is good. And no western government is gonna care because we let ourselves become so dependent on cheap chinese manufacturing.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- bluGill 5mo agoWestern courts have a different perspective since they pretty much universally don't have the larger issue of the Chinese manufacturing as a consideration. Which is to day you can go to any western court and have import stopped at the border.
- gcmrtc 5mo agoIts a company. They don't give a single flying fuck.
- zipy124 5mo agoIt's become rather clear that Open source licenses are vulnerable, since defending them costs large amount of money, and proving violations can be hard since by definition the products that break them are closed-source.
- misswaterfairy 5mo agoSoftware Freedom Conservancy is at least fighting back. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-printer-agpl-violation-response/ https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...
- AshamedCaptain 5mo agoI am annoyed that they just claim that "reverse engineering" will take care of this, instead of really trying to fight back legally. This is a social problem, and reverse engineering can only help up to a point.
- pabs3 5mo agoThey are likely pretty busy with their lawsuit against Vizio, which is going to trial in August and would set a very interesting precedent if won. https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html
- ndiddy 5mo agoI think the Vizio lawsuit will set a more narrow precedent than the SFC wants. The tentative ruling the judge in that case made in December (not binding, but represents the judge's current understanding of the case going into the trial) is that Vizio has a contractual obligation to provide the GPL source code for the TV the SFC bought because the TV has an offer to provide source code upon request buried in one of the menus. The tentative ruling doesn't cover what happens if a company doesn't offer to provide source code. In the future, a company that uses GPL code without a source code offer could argue that third-party GPL beneficiaries have no grounds to sue because there's no contract being violated, and this would take another lawsuit to resolve.
- Tomte 5mo agoThat was my impression, as well, but I recently met SFC people and they assured me that the judge is taking the third party beneficiary doctrine very seriously, it‘s not off the table. Funnily, because Vizio objected to the tentative ruling, it has little meaning now. The trial in August will handle the TPB stuff, as well. It will be streamed, btw.
- ndiddy 5mo ago
- amazingamazing 5mo agoOpen source for medium and small projects is dead if enforcement is a consideration. Trivial to reimplement in same or other language and give yourself plausible deniability.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoKind of love the irony of this being an xcancel link
- permalac 5mo agoWhat is the irony here?
- amazingamazing 5mo agoXcancel is against the x terms of service. But no one really cares because it is not perceived as an issue, similar to this situation
- pocksuppet 5mo agoTerms of service are not legally binding, copyright licenses are legally binding.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoThere is no precedent for AGPL enforcement against Chinese companies, so no, not really. Feel free to post a docket if you disagree though. Also there are plenty of cases for ToS violations look up Facebook vs BrandTotal, or more recently Epic vs Apple. In the same way no one here cares about archive.org paywall circumvention, non techie end users don't care about open source violations (why should they). Look at the very link we are discussing for proof.
- pocksuppet 5mo agoIt's up to the copyright owner to sue for copyright infringement.
- bellowsgulch 5mo agoThis is not universally true. Some, but not all, terms of service are explicitly a contract between the business and the user.
- SlinkyOnStairs 5mo agoThis post is now gone. Click the down button and stop reading. It seems we have arrived at the "HN does not read license texts" hour again.
- misnome 5mo ago> Which reduces the problem down to "is Bambu doing that"? Given the installer is 300 megabytes, it probably contains both the application and the plugin, but you go launch an international lawsuit over "probably". No, the plugin is downloaded at runtime on first launch The amount of outright obfuscation with this issue is absurd. Either many of the big names that have jumped on the bandwagon are credulous idiots or deliberately misrepresenting what has happened for their own gain.
- wongarsu 5mo ago> Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately Of course they can. The nature of any software license boils down to "this work is protected by copyright. If you comply to A, B and C, you can do D, E and F that otherwise would have violated copyright law". A, B and C can be whatever you want. It can be "don't use this in nuclear power plants" (MS likes that condition), it can be "if you make less than $100k anually" (Unity etc), or it can be "if you share the source code" (copyleft). You can make that clause as wide or unrelated as you want The real issue with GPL and AGPL is how badly defined the boundary is unless you have a single compiled C program
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- comandillos 5mo agoCannot agree more with Josef on how dangerous this is for our intellectual property; Of course there laws and mechanisms in China for the government to obtain any information retained by their companies under any possible justification, but the US does so, and thanks to the Cloud Act they can simply decide to do the same with any of the big players sitting in their territory (even to servers located out of their territory). So, taking into account >80% of European companies rely either on Amazon, Microsoft or Google to store all their most private and business sensitive data, is this any different from all the data we are possibly leaking already? Same with AI, same with the phones and payment systems we use on a daily basis... Sometimes I just have the impression that this has nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property but rather with finding an enemy and focus on that while pretending everything else is fine... and a blogpost from the owner of Prusa Research talking about their main competitor is a good demonstration of that.
- awestroke 5mo agoYour cloud act is making American cloud vendors lose customers in droves
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- pbasista 5mo ago> pretending everything else is fine No one pretends that everything else is fine. It is in my opinion reasonable to call out any violations of any law or any violations of the users' or companies' privacy as they are spotted. And everyone is best suited to spot issues in areas or fields in which they operate.
- luma 5mo agoWhat's frustrating is that Prusa isn't too far removed from how Bambu works today. Prusa-Link (the onboard firmware) allows you to do very basic job control but has essentially zero machine control and very little telemetry. All the major functionality is behind their PrusaConnect cloud service, which they've now added a paid tier to, and which they've been promising for years to open source in order to allow print farms to run offline. I love Prusa printers and all my machines are Prusa, but they really do need to get their software situation sorted because in it's current form, it's somewhat hard to distinguish from the operational reality of Bambu - if I want to use all the features on my XL, I need to send my files to Czechia first.
- thriododkdje 5mo agoI would like some precedents, to see if AGPL is actually enforceable. Many licenses put several demands on user, but are some parts are void and illegal. Like OEM licenses for MS Windows, that forbit reselling. License can not order someone to publish something. They may not have a rights to publish code, or it was created as part of employment...
- skeledrew 5mo agoA license is as enforceable as there are lawyers to advocate for it in court, judges to make rulings for it, and a system of enforcement to make any rulings a reality. Doesn't really matter what's in the license itself.
- ahtihn 5mo ago> License can not order someone to publish something. No it can't, you are right. By default, you don't have any right to use any given software. The license outlines the conditions under which you have are permitted to use it. If you don't comply with the conditions, you aren't permitted to use it. The license isn't ordering you to do anything, you can simply not use the software!
- sterlind 5mo agoaccepting AGPL means you're vowing to publish derivative work. if you aren't legally allowed to publish that work, you violated its terms. the Court may not order you to publish to cure the violation, if you lack the rights to do so, but they can still order you to pay damages. if I sign a contract saying I'll produce a million Iron Man action figures, but I don't have the IP for Iron Man, I can't just shrug my shoulders and say "well, you can't make me." the Court would make me pay damages.
- deno 5mo agoAGPLv3 still has the termination clause which is at least in the worst case (total failure to comply) entirely self-contained. I'm not however convinced they are really in violation by calling a binary plugin. GPL itself does not forbid you from dynamically linking to or calling unrelated software. The network plugin is analogous to a device driver, it's not core part of the slicer. GPL differentiates between a "Combined Work" and an "Aggregate": > A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate. If they tried to add DRM to Bambu Studio and prevent you from replacing their blackbox with a different one then that would be where they would clearly go against the v3's TiVo provisions.
- dsign 5mo agoI can't help but wonder how could, Bambulabs or the Chinese government, actually mine that data? In my mind, 3D models fail into two categories: artistic and utilitarian, though there's a continuum between those two. With the artistic side, the Chinese government could find itself in possession of tons and tons of Western miniatures. With the utilitarian side, they will find themselves in possession of lots and lots of random parts with no way to know what they are for. Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...
- parker-3461 5mo agoI was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be: - Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it. - Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through. It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.
- Joel_Mckay 5mo agoIn general, the PRC government will install local politically connected members into advisor roles in almost all large companies. It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter. The locked ecosystem posture is simply because with a billion people a firm of any size always has irrational competitors/cloners. Sometimes the governments national policy aligns with a firm, but the support always comes at a price for every business owner. Communism is certainly different with subsidized labor pools, and worker support obligations. Both China and the US governments engage in trade policy/intelligence shenanigans to try to position themselves for whats more than fair. Global businesses must learn there is no difference between feigned incompetence, and real negligence. As a small firm most simply can't afford to defend themselves legally if targeted, and vastly undervalue why QA checkpoint roles are important. =3 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm China is a big place, having both good and bad businesses... just like the US. =3
- doginasuit 5mo ago[flagged]
- pocksuppet 5mo agoCopyleft is about freedom of consumers to make whatever choice fits their target, unlike permissive licensing, which is about freedom of corporations to take away freedom of consumers.
- doginasuit 5mo agoSurprisingly, there are use-cases for closed source other than the of greed of corporations. A server is one of those use-cases. I love to see open source servers and have worked on them myself but there are obvious reasons why that is not always feasible.
- rileymat2 5mo agoGreed is a loaded word, there are economic realities of paying developers to create the open source software. Could you elaborate on the non-economic use cases you are thinking of?
- doginasuit 5mo agoThat was my point too. There are valid reasons to go with closed source, open source may not be a viable option for a variety of concerns, including economic realities. The person I was replying to raised the issue of corporations that take and do not give back (which definitely exist) and I was responding to it.
- rileymat2 5mo agoYes, we don't have a great business model for this yet. We see the problems caused by things like Elastic Search either locking away important features or getting killed by well funded incumbents like Amazon. My response was asking more, when you said "use cases" if there were non-economic ones you had in mind. Years ago I got it in my head that we needed an open source copy left license that allowed for automatic licensing/royalty schemes in commercial use where the money would flow down to the project. This would give end users complete control over the software and modifications to the software, while distribution and money generated would be shared up the supply chain. I still would like to see something like that but have no idea how to frame it.
- karel-3d 5mo agoCan you just sue them over it? Sure they are a Chinese company but they also operate in Europe and US?
- graemep 5mo agoYou can sue them if they have operations in a country you choose to sue in, or supply people in that country, or you can sue their importers and distributors. Maybe even marketplace sites if they sell through those.
- jopsen 5mo agoSue the ISPs for enabling piracy? If their license is void, then distribution is illegal, right?
- My_Name 5mo agoI use my printer to make prototypes for my business. There is no way in hell I'm sending them into the internet for some random to examine. I think my next printer will be mostly 3D printed, with a few generic parts like motor controllers, the odd bit of metal tubing, off the shelf bed levelling system, open source software etc. I only need single colour prints for work, and AFAIK the fastest printer on the planet is mostly 3D printed, I'd start with that one as a base and adapt it for my needs. I considered Bambu until they started down the road that ends with me not having control of the product I own. Any company on that path does not get my money.
- amazingamazing 5mo agoSeems like an overreaction. Licensing aside it is trivial to use a Bambu completely air gapped. If someone uses AI at all but cares about this I hope the irony is not lost on them.
- Filligree 5mo agoOr a Prusa. They even sell a variant with no network hardware at all, for the terminally paranoid.
- tjoff 5mo agoOr, just maybe, buy a printer that does not actively disrespect their users?
- jazzyjackson 5mo agoI guess it depends on what you value more highly, a machine from a company that respects intellectual property, or a machine that reliably prints parts without intervention.
- tjoff 5mo agoPlenty of printers that do both.
- 5mo ago
- jonas_jensen 5mo agoCan I just say: thank you for posting an xcancel link and not linking to X directly! I forgot Xcancel was a thing, I might actually start using it occasionally now.
- ddtaylor 5mo agoIts pretty widely used on HN from what I notice.
- schnebbau 5mo agoWhat are the benefits of using xcancel?
- 16bitvoid 5mo agoYou don't have to login to X or download the app (if you're on mobile). X won't let you see the replies otherwise. I also prefer that the layout is denser and you can see more content at once, at least on my phone.
- jchw 5mo agoIn addition to the other benefits, it's very lightweight. There is an anti-SPAM redirect but no huge JS bundles, just basic HTML.
- himata4113 5mo agoI noticed that xcancel links are rewritten to x.com more often than not, probably due to the fact that xcancel will not last like xitter, nitter and all the ones before it. I hope that archive services implement preserving twitter content.
- homarp 5mo agonitter recovered, it works now e.g. https://nitter.net/josefprusa/status/2054602354851254330 https://nitter.net/josefprusa/status/2054602354851254330 Nitter instances status pages: https://status.d420.de/ https://status.d420.de/
- 5mo ago
- rasz 5mo agoI sure hope none of Ukrainian shops use Bambu Cloud printers to do their drone manufacturing.
- Hfuffzehn 5mo agoWith DeepSeek making their price rebates permanent we now have some data what China values data access at. Western providers of the open weight models are 3 times or more as expensive as DeepSeek itself right now. Of course the data access for the Chinese is not the only part valued in there, but I am pretty sure it is one.
- xyzzy_plugh 5mo agoI don't like all this shaming on social media. It feels performative and leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If they're in violation of your copyright agreements, sue them. If you can't sue them because it's unenforceable, well, that sucks, but too bad. I don't know what they expect to happen here. Is there even a clear call to action? Boycott? Do something.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoI think the courts are so inefficient, not to mention limited to single countries, that huge "social protests" like this seems more efficient if you actually want to see some change, rather than the year-long process of going through the courts. I do agree with you though, that every time these things happen I also get a somewhat sour taste in my mouth. Ideally there'd be better venues for things like this, but based on history it seems to be the most effective way, sadly.
- kennywinker 5mo ago> Back then we considered legal action. We seriously did. But the practical reality: PrusaSlicer is software, not hardware. There's no boxed product crossing customs to stop - only real possibility which would make them comply. And jurisdiction for the licensee lands in China, which means the case lands in a Chinese court applying Chinese law to a Chinese company. If there is no legal recourse, but you believe in the ideas and philosophy of copyleft, then all that is left is social enforcement. I.e. don’t buy their printers and tell your friends not to buy their printers. But you seem to have a problem with that second part because it’s “performative”? Ok… Or is it just that you’d rather the call to action was clearer? Because it’s pretty clear to me.
- xyzzy_plugh 5mo agoI understand, appreciate and respect copyleft but I'm no zealot. Fundamentally this rubs me the same wrong way as others attempting to enforce social contracts do. It feels wrong to assume that western ethics should be universal and apply to a foreign entity such as a business in China. Perhaps they simply view this as a viable approach? And, surprise, it is, at least for them. Do I wish that weren't the case? Sure, that'd be grand. But I don't see how this post gets us any closer to that fantasy. Put yourself in their shoes. Someone released some software under a license designed around a foreign legal framework that doesn't apply to you. You can make products using that software that people want and make money. Is it your fault you are immune from the license? Is it your government's? Is it wrong to do so? I don't think it's clear enough. And yeah the call to action should be clear. It's not. I don't see why they can't pursue legal action and go for damages or at the very least prevent the sale of their printers in local jurisdictions. Perhaps that would still be performative but it at least creates precedence that others can use to strengthen their own cases, or allow governments to push for action. But it appears like they're doing nothing. If the US or the EU are going to do nothing about Chinese companies pedaling wares derived from US/EU IP made possible only by dodging licensing requirements then perhaps it's simply not a viable approach to rely on copyleft to protect you. Or you can try and change that.
- swordlucky666 5mo ago[flagged]
- rirze 5mo agoSurprise: another day of mechanical engineers not really understanding what open source really means. I mean this as general advice; never trust software released/written/shared by mechanical/robotics engineers, especially ones from China. There's something deep-seated in their psychology where they ignore coding standards and can't conceptualize and obey software licenses.
- amluto 5mo agoAm I the only one who read this and contemplated that it would be entirely straightforward for a Chinese AI inference provider to efficiently scan their input and output token streams to identify cryptographic keys, access tokens and interesting vulnerabilities? (And, frankly, for Western providers to do similar things. Even major players like OpenAI have terms that really should not be seen as commercially acceptable unless you manage to negotiate ZDR.)
- abacadaba 5mo ago100% chance that access to every major company is somewhere in the chat logs
- kayson 5mo ago> The standard defense for something like this is "the plugin is a separate work, so it's not subject to copyleft." That argument falls apart on contact with the actual software. BS cannot do its primary job without the plugin. The plugin cannot do anything without BS. But that's just not true? You can connect a printer in LAN/dev mode and print directly from slicer to printer. There are apparently some issues with more complex network setups but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule. I think the concerns he has generally are valid, but I have yet to see something from a legal perspective (e.g. precedent) that convinces me this constitutes a license violation. Would love to see one.
- 9cb14c1ec0 5mo ago3D printing is still very much an enthusiast, techie driver market. The degree to which Bambu has done their best to alienate that market is beyond astonishing. I really like Bambu's machines. Their quality and prices are both excellent. But they no longer have an edge feature and speed wise. I can get pretty much the same product from Creality, so why would I even entertain a user-hostile company like Bambu?
- hightrix 5mo agoAnecdotally, I'm in the market for a new 3d printer and have been heavily considering a few Bambu models. All this drama, of which I'm not well informed on, is making me consider other vendors. Without these issues, I would have already bought a Bambu printer. Now, I'm investigating all competitors.
- filcuk 5mo agoYou'd do well to avoid them if you want to own your printer forever. I have 3 different Prusa printers, few of which have gone through several upgrades, and I love working with them (and not on them, as I'mnot the tinkering type).
- hightrix 5mo agoThanks for the feedback. Prusa is on the top of my list at the moment. That's exactly what I want, to use it and not to work on it.
- ezst 5mo agoIf you haven't already, you might want to read the twitter thread at the root of this HN discussion. It essentially postulates that all Chinese 3D Printer manufacturers are incentivised to follow in the steps of BambuLabs (being members of the state apparatus and subject to the same rules), while suffocating the competition outside of China (by benefitting from unfair advantages under the umbrella of a nationalistic development plan).
- bluescrn 5mo ago
- yummypaint 5mo agoWhere is the lawyer involvement? Why has no TRO been filed to prevent Bambu from selling in the US? This is a problem with a legal solution, yet we collectively just wring our hands and wish for a technological solution.
- Eisenstein 5mo agoLawsuits need standing. Someone harmed has to sue.
- yummypaint 5mo agoThat's what I'm asking... Why not? I'm alluding to what seems to be a culturally self-imposed refusal to seek legal remedies among makers and hackers. We have Jeff Geerling (who I generally like and agree with) disappointingly referring to the GPL as a "social contract," as though it can have no legal force behind it. The biggest companies in the world use licenses to weild power over people, but heaven forbid people use the same body of law to their benefit.
- mystraline 5mo agoToo bad the Software freedom conservency and FSF dont have harsh punitive measures they push. Else theyd demand a pound of CEO flesh, or push the US gov to ban all imports and sales. Instead, its negotiation and laughable settlements. As someone who does work with FLOSS, if I violated their copyright/patent, theyd extract pounfs of flesh from me. Tit for tat. Im done with nice. I want blood from corporations who wrong us.
- jopsen 5mo agoHow is there no enforcement paths? If Josef really wants to go after BambuLab over AGPL violations he can do what the music/movie industries did: have them blocked at the ISP level. Cease and desist for all servers outside China. Block traffic at ISP levels. Unlike various pirate websites there won't be a hundred copy cats to also hunt down.
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoMay 13th post OP? [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48109224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48115127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48115127