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?
nekusar · 2026-08-26 18:02:20 UTC
Sure block them.
Or they can pay statutory maximum copyright violations of $120000 per copy violated.
Per copy.
LoganDark · 2026-08-26 18:52:18 UTC
This sounds more like a wish?
polski-g · 2026-08-26 18:37:06 UTC
They could sue amazon to get a list of Bambu buyers, then go after them.
ChickeNES · 2026-08-26 20:30:22 UTC
You want them to go after the buyers??
polski-g · 2026-08-26 20:58:41 UTC
Yes. It's the only way to cause material harm to the company.
ChickeNES · 2026-08-26 21:03:29 UTC
Not at all, do you not understand how customs works? What cause of action do you propose against the buyers? Do you not care about the law, you just want maximum retribution?
icehawk · 2026-08-26 21:36:53 UTC
How does that work when the buyers have already paid?
tylergetsay · 2026-08-26 18:40:49 UTC
Presumably they have _some_ assets in the USA
spott · 2026-08-26 19:36:22 UTC
Banning import/sale of the product into the US is worth a hell of a lot.
LoganDark · 2026-08-26 20:51:38 UTC
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)
dspillett · 2026-08-26 21:10:26 UTC
> Deciding nobody can have the software at all is completely opposite to the spirit of the license.
Any import block would be on the hardware, not the software. And the software would need to be released for other territories anyway.
LoganDark · 2026-08-26 21:18:20 UTC
As a buyer I'd be just as unhappy to be unable to get the hardware. I already have some, but if I wanted some new feature it doesn't have and that open-source definitely doesn't have, I'd be miffed to say the least if I couldn't get it just because Bambu didn't release the source code.
dspillett · 2026-08-28 14:44:02 UTC
I see how it could be inconvenient for you, but should it being inconvenient for people be a valid reason for letting them continue to break licensing terms when they could end the whole situation immediately by stopping breaking the licensing terms?
asveikau · 2026-08-26 18:12:01 UTC
It's been pretty weird and disappointing to see the way Bambu has taken over with these practices.
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
svachalek · 2026-08-26 18:17:43 UTC
It's a shame because the Bambu product line is genuinely first class. They don't need to play these games to compete, and could have won a lot of genuine good will by giving a little back to the community.
wongarsu · 2026-08-26 18:39:32 UTC
Haven't these (A)GPL violations been there for most of the company's history? It's the context around them that changed.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
asveikau · 2026-08-26 19:17:11 UTC
> apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is it's meant to block this kind of behavior. Certainly it's against the spirit of it.
dspillett · 2026-08-26 21:17:59 UTC
> and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source
But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.
dofm · 2026-08-26 19:29:13 UTC
Bambu and Prusa are both engaged in harm.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.
CamperBob2 · 2026-08-26 22:46:10 UTC
What's Prusa doing wrong?
dofm · 2026-08-27 00:53:40 UTC
The Open Community Licence is a horrible mistake, even with the recent modifications.
mrheosuper · 2026-08-27 02:41:03 UTC
it's hard to convince people to past over bambu when the alternative is either: Crappier (Ender, Creality), or much more expensive (Prusa).
poulpy123 · 2026-08-27 07:53:33 UTC
Prusa was always great on these issues, even their printers were open source
PonyoSunshine · 2026-08-26 18:16:43 UTC
We just purchased a brand new top of the line Bambu with all the accessories, only for it to be defective on arrival. Their front panel display uses such thin fonts, it makes it almost impossible to read without glasses, and their error codes just send you in infinite loops that make you want to pull your hair out. They really spin themselves as the end all and be all to turn key professional 3d printing, and the reality has been anything but. We are currently waiting on a new part from China that will show up when whomever knows and at best, and all they could offer us a minor credit towards spending more money that doesn't even equal an hours pay.
I wish I could talk better about them, but what a let down. I really hope someone really figures out how to put the screws to them over this GPL violation.
dgellow · 2026-08-26 18:51:27 UTC
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
miladyincontrol · 2026-08-26 18:59:27 UTC
Same, it doesnt get much more plug and play as theirs
m4rtink · 2026-08-26 20:32:16 UTC
What about Prusa printers - something they are missing/are not available in your area or something else ?
MindSpunk · 2026-08-26 22:37:09 UTC
They cost 3x as much
lkjdsklf · 2026-08-27 06:18:22 UTC
They are quite good and typically better built (steel instead of plastic in lots of key places)
But they do not work as well out of the box. They require a lot more tuning and calibration. They also lack some quality of life features. For example, changing a nozzle on a bambu printer is a 15 second job. You just pop off the cover, hit the filament cutter, and the nozzle is magnetic. Changing it on a prusa core one is a few minutes and requires tools.
And on top of that, the prusa will cost considerably more and take longer to ship
bcjdjsndon · 2026-08-27 12:46:28 UTC
> For example, changing a nozzle on a bambu printer is a 15 second job.
Unless it randomly blocks itself.... I spend so much time on that shit
eknkc · 2026-08-26 19:44:20 UTC
Yeah, their devices simply worked and worked fine for us.
bcjdjsndon · 2026-08-27 12:45:05 UTC
They are better than all the other tripe at that level
ChuckMcM · 2026-08-26 18:17:02 UTC
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 here, but its one of the paradoxes of "free software" which is there isn't any money generated by the licenses that keep it free. Where as "licensed" software has a revenue stream that is used to enforce the license against people who fail to honor it. The FSF can only do so much with their budget here.
Aurornis · 2026-08-26 18:51:13 UTC
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 started. It's a confusing thing to say next to the broad claims about violations.
biker142541 · 2026-08-26 19:05:44 UTC
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.
ZiiS · 2026-08-26 19:10:12 UTC
He is saying a judge will not care that they are technically a separate download. They only care if the end result is complying with the spirit of the license.
pocksuppet · 2026-08-27 01:50:58 UTC
GPL licenses are so much interpreted along lines of license intent that a German judge ruled GPLv2 software couldn't be Tivoized.
john01dav · 2026-08-27 07:01:42 UTC
I would expect this to forcibly unlock the bootloaders of every Android phone sold in Germany (because the Linux kernel, used on all such phones, is GPLv2, and to replace it the bootloader must be unlocked, and tivoization means restriction of the right to replace it), yet as far as I know this is not the case.
So, what am I missing? Which specific German cases are you thinking about?
pocksuppet · 2026-08-27 17:58:40 UTC
Steck vs AVM. But the bootloader on your phone is still locked because companies don't have to comply with the law until you sue them. If you live in Germany, you should sue them.
simiones · 2026-08-27 13:20:19 UTC
Can you share a link?
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.
JoshTriplett · 2026-08-26 19:26:56 UTC
I think he's saying the opposite: that "clever" attempts to work around the license aren't things a judge is going to appreciate.
Aurornis · 2026-08-26 19:44:43 UTC
That would make more sense. Thank you.
ChuckMcM · 2026-08-26 19:33:38 UTC
For background, I participated in a "small" action that Sun took against someone who was violating the Java license. The legal fees (in the late 90's) were 8.2 million dollars. $250K is nothing to sneeze at, its a solid 6 weeks of a single lawyer's time, maybe a couple of weeks for a small team. Against a company doing nearly a billion dollars a year in revenue[1] and owning 29% of the printer market? Add in a couple of expert witnesses which are essential to that sort of a case and you'll see that $250K isn't even table stakes. Sad, I know, but it is the way things are these days.
And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.
Lawyers earn 250k per 6 weeks? More than 2M per year?
ChuckMcM · 2026-08-26 20:39:21 UTC
Yes. Well they certainly bill at that rate, it goes some to the lawyer, some to rent, etc.
bonoboTP · 2026-08-26 22:11:53 UTC
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.
LastTrain · 2026-08-27 02:41:00 UTC
IP litigation is absolutely that expensive, outside the US and inside. Didn’t you just come into this conversation unaware of what IP litigators earn?
Ancapistani · 2026-08-27 02:57:00 UTC
Can you imagine how litigious we'd be if legal services were cheaper?
john01dav · 2026-08-27 07:09:02 UTC
This just means that there's pent up demand for litigation that is currently left unfulfilled because it's too expensive. Or, equivalently, many people think that they have been wronged and must simply take it, due to litigation being the only option to enforce that issue while litigation is too expensive to be affordable to them, or more expensive than the cost of the dispute (so, in effect, scamming people out of small dollar amounts is legal since the cost of enforcing one's legal rights may be in excess of the cost of the dispute).
Imagine what would happen if we made it cheaper, as happens very frequently when some other good or service becomes cheaper? Usually the provision/manufacture has some advancements that make it much more scalable, and often less involved, resulting in a lower cost, and sometimes but not always lower quality. So, for litigation? We'd get lower cost, via some more efficient¹ system², maybe lower quality depending on how we make that system more efficient and this may or may not matter in any particular case, and then those people who think that they've been wronged suddenly have an avenue to address it. Overall, this seems like a strong positive to me.
Now, what if people start enforcing frivolous legal rights? Repeal or reform the law that creates the right if it' s so bad. What about people dragging others into court in bad faith? Well, we just streamlined the bureaucracy and took a buzz-saw to the costs, so is it hard to defend against? Perhaps not. Making that perhaps a certain reality would be a good goal of such reform methods. We already allow people with more money and systemic literacy to bully people in this way, and this is a large part of litigiousness in our society now, so this strategy becoming ineffective may reduce it substantially and thus ironically make litigiousness less intense in at least some cases.
1: one proposal off the top of my head (so it may be terrible): sending written documents to a judge with LLMs helping lay people write and refine them, or a cheaper-than-a-litigation-lawyer expert human review service, perhaps, then the judge rules on their own schedule asynchronously for civil disputes without any heavy procedure to deal with.
2: another proposal is to remove law school/JD requirements to obtain a law license, but keeping a rigorous test in place and maybe some less-intense character/background checks, to lower the pay of lawyers
CDRdude · 2026-08-27 14:37:43 UTC
> 2: another proposal is to remove law school/JD requirements to obtain a law license, but keeping a rigorous test in place […]
That is not meaningfully different to my estimation, since it is not test-only. Instead, you need to get accepted to an internship/apprenticeship, and then do that for a number of years, prior to having the law license. For gatekeeping purposes, this is functionally the same as requiring getting accepted into a law school and then doing that for a number of years prior to having the law license.
simiones · 2026-08-27 13:29:17 UTC
Nothing stops anyone from briging a suit and representing themselves.
Lawyers fees for a case like that also include expenses, and this would be on the high side.
Court fees, fees for accessing case law, experts, paralegals, etc.
You pay the lawyer and a big portion of that goes towards his costs for additional labour and everything else. A lawyer grossing $2m/year isn't bringing home anything close to that.
That said $250k for a single lawyer for 6 weeks seems high.
LastTrain · 2026-08-27 02:31:24 UTC
Yes. About 5-10% at a big firm earn that.
devmor · 2026-08-27 05:38:54 UTC
I've only had to hire a lawyer once, and it was $2,500 to have them file a couple papers and speak to the judge once.
You're paying for their experience, just like an engineer - only it's often much higher stakes than a piece of software or product: your livelihood or freedom.
bonoboTP · 2026-08-27 12:22:13 UTC
The reason engineers don't cost this much is that lawyers are lawyer brained smooth talking networking types who hold together tightly and have a quid pro quo system and you have to pay protection money to their mafia. Law is based on rubbing elbows in the right places, playing tennis and golf with the right people and in case of jury trials, on acting convincingly and exuding a certain image to manipulate their emotions. Engineers are too autistic to hold together end rent seek this much.
LastTrain · 2026-08-27 15:30:27 UTC
But some engineers do make that much. I say this as a fellow software engineer: why do so many of my colleagues think every other profession is worthless bullshit? BTW, statistically, SEs and Lawyers earn about the same...
bonoboTP · 2026-08-27 19:18:41 UTC
The top of top frontier AI research talent maybe makes 2M and I'd guess you have at most a few hundred such people globally but maybe just a few dozen.
Non "FAANG" (or whatever the new term is) software engineers often make sub-100k even in the US. And regular sw engineers won't break above 500k unless they are managers heading some large team or branch. Getting over 1M is almost superstar level as a sw engineer. If you think it's common, you must be in a tiny SV bubble.
LastTrain · 2026-08-27 22:53:27 UTC
I said some, and pointed out that on average SE’s and lawyers get paid about the same. This conversation started on IP litigators, who generally have a BS degree in a related field and often times experience in the industry they practice, so yes they are amongst the best compensated.
bonoboTP · 2026-08-27 23:32:28 UTC
Aside, but IP is a propaganda term. These laws are not property rights, their purposes are varied and usually have the wider public as the beneficiary in their reasoning for existing, it's not like ensuring right to actual property.
ChickeNES · 2026-08-26 20:39:54 UTC
I guess I need to buy another printer to fund the other side?
sailfast · 2026-08-27 13:10:18 UTC
I would imagine any settlement dollars would be enough of a carrot to get a lawyer involved. Has anyone actually sued over this yet?
criddell · 2026-08-27 14:38:23 UTC
It's really difficult to collect any judgement in China.
I can't find the source right now, but I believe punitive damages are excluded. So all you could collect would be actual damages. What are the actual damages Bambu owners have suffered?
mschuster91 · 2026-08-26 19:21:59 UTC
> I think the Bambu case is a good one to litigate the AGPL but perhaps should start in the Court of International Trade.
IMHO that kind of stuff would have to go through the WTO but unfortunately Trump gutted that one already way back in his first term.
WillPostForFood · 2026-08-26 19:34:51 UTC
Some context on the US/WTO conflict. It started under Obama, blocking reappointment of two judges. Trump in term 1 went all in, stopping all appointments. When Biden was elected he fully maintained and supported the policy of blocking judges. So it has been more of a bipartisan policy than "Trump gutted".
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.
sgarland · 2026-08-27 00:06:33 UTC
There’s no need to reverse engineer it, just build a Voron 2.4.
simiones · 2026-08-27 13:34:18 UTC
Do you mean physically modifying a printer you bought from Bambu, and selling that on? Potentially as a service, where you buy in bulk and re-sell with this modification? If so, I don't see how that would change anything about the software you're allowed to run on it.
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.
_carbyau_ · 2026-08-28 03:05:35 UTC
I was thinking more of a make your own copy of their printer and run free software on it rather than theirs.
It just seems like they don't have that much of a moat which is why they are guarding the software bit as much as they can.
krupan · 2026-08-27 13:46:42 UTC
As long as nothing in the printer's design is patented or trademarked then yes, you can reverse engineer it and sell your own version of it
gnuplustoejam · 2026-08-26 18:35:32 UTC
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.
ZiiS · 2026-08-26 19:12:09 UTC
They built on a foundation of not respecting US intellectual property; copyright licenses were also ignored.
dspillett · 2026-08-26 20:26:46 UTC
Any intellectual property (though they only get away with internal transgressions if their government approves).
Unfortunately that seems to increasingly be the status quo these days, look at US companies and their attitude to IP when it suits them to ignore licenses for LLM training purposes.
Gigachad · 2026-08-27 04:05:29 UTC
IP will only be respected if there is a mutually beneficial reason to do it. The US would need to offer China something they need in exchange for enforcing IP.
The US does not respect the EU's Protected Designation of Origin laws because they have more to gain by ignoring them. China has more to gain by ignoring US IP laws.
Joel_Mckay · 2026-08-27 04:25:59 UTC
Shhh, don't point out the massive isomorphic plagiarism of GPL, markup user, and BSD licensed code.
People want to pretend LLM vector search compaction output isn't copyright and trademark violation. We are in the Napster phase of the market exploitation.
On a positive note there is nothing left of value to steal/scrape, so the problem will likely eventually be self-correcting. =3
10000truths · 2026-08-27 07:39:11 UTC
Intellectual property is nothing more than a means of government-backed protectionism, alongside tariffs and embargoes. Any two countries that respect one anothers' claims of intellectual property do so by mutual agreement. No sovereign is entitled to unilaterally dictate the terms of trade with another, and that includes the exchange of ideas.
j16sdiz · 2026-08-27 12:41:23 UTC
> Any two countries that respect .... by mutual agreement.
Guess how China got their membership in WTO ?
Yizahi · 2026-08-27 13:34:09 UTC
They literally raided and hijacked the whole Chinese Arm division and continued using all IP. Chinese don't care about theft really, "it's more like a suggestion" (c) Barbossa
amelius · 2026-08-27 13:08:44 UTC
So? The AI industry is built upon a foundation of copyright violations and nobody seems to care anymore.
Surac · 2026-08-26 18:40:27 UTC
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
Aurornis · 2026-08-26 18:43:51 UTC
> 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.
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.
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.
teddyh · 2026-08-26 20:12:49 UTC
Like JoshTriplett explains in other places in this thread, Kühn means that the judge will not care about Bambu Studio’s workarounds; i.e. that the judge will see through these as the tricks they are, and not allow Bambu Studio to get away with it.
misnome · 2026-08-27 08:04:27 UTC
This is a convenient handwave to pretend that they are violating when to the word of the license they aren’t.
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?
hWuxH · 2026-08-27 18:18:22 UTC
Why are you too stupid to get that the moment software binaries for the slicer are distributed is when they have to ship source code?
Next time read the AGPL instead of making smartass assumptions.
When the printer hardware is released "to the general public" or "backers" is entirely irrelevant...
sneak · 2026-08-26 18:44:39 UTC
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.
Der_Einzige · 2026-08-26 19:07:15 UTC
Yup. IP abolitionism it turns out is a sword that can slay yourself too. I support abolishing it even to the point of making all EULA unenforceable for good.
Comments
Or they can pay statutory maximum copyright violations of $120000 per copy violated.
Per copy.
Any import block would be on the hardware, not the software. And the software would need to be released for other territories anyway.
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is it's meant to block this kind of behavior. Certainly it's against the spirit of it.
But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.
I wish I could talk better about them, but what a let down. I really hope someone really figures out how to put the screws to them over this GPL violation.
But they do not work as well out of the box. They require a lot more tuning and calibration. They also lack some quality of life features. For example, changing a nozzle on a bambu printer is a 15 second job. You just pop off the cover, hit the filament cutter, and the nozzle is magnetic. Changing it on a prusa core one is a few minutes and requires tools.
And on top of that, the prusa will cost considerably more and take longer to ship
Unless it randomly blocks itself.... I spend so much time on that shit
Not to be too glib here, but its one of the paradoxes of "free software" which is there isn't any money generated by the licenses that keep it free. Where as "licensed" software has a revenue stream that is used to enforce the license against people who fail to honor it. The FSF can only do so much with their budget here.
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 started. It's a confusing thing to say next to the broad claims about violations.
So, what am I missing? Which specific German cases are you thinking about?
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.
And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.
[1] "Media reports have also indicated that Bambu Lab has shipped more than 1.2 million units, claiming a 29% global share." -- https://kr-asia.com/bambu-lab-nears-usd-100-billion-valuatio...
Imagine what would happen if we made it cheaper, as happens very frequently when some other good or service becomes cheaper? Usually the provision/manufacture has some advancements that make it much more scalable, and often less involved, resulting in a lower cost, and sometimes but not always lower quality. So, for litigation? We'd get lower cost, via some more efficient¹ system², maybe lower quality depending on how we make that system more efficient and this may or may not matter in any particular case, and then those people who think that they've been wronged suddenly have an avenue to address it. Overall, this seems like a strong positive to me.
Now, what if people start enforcing frivolous legal rights? Repeal or reform the law that creates the right if it' s so bad. What about people dragging others into court in bad faith? Well, we just streamlined the bureaucracy and took a buzz-saw to the costs, so is it hard to defend against? Perhaps not. Making that perhaps a certain reality would be a good goal of such reform methods. We already allow people with more money and systemic literacy to bully people in this way, and this is a large part of litigiousness in our society now, so this strategy becoming ineffective may reduce it substantially and thus ironically make litigiousness less intense in at least some cases.
1: one proposal off the top of my head (so it may be terrible): sending written documents to a judge with LLMs helping lay people write and refine them, or a cheaper-than-a-litigation-lawyer expert human review service, perhaps, then the judge rules on their own schedule asynchronously for civil disputes without any heavy procedure to deal with.
2: another proposal is to remove law school/JD requirements to obtain a law license, but keeping a rigorous test in place and maybe some less-intense character/background checks, to lower the pay of lawyers
This does exist, but has become less common over time instead of more common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law
It is for the UK but no doubt m'learned friends in the US can command even higher fees.
Try grabbing a KC for five days, civil/commercial with all the trimmings. That will set you back £105,000.
Obviously the impoverished KC won't pocket all that lolly. There is VAT to pay and staff costs and stuff.
A KC is one of these: https://kcappointments.org/ for obvious reasons they used to known as QCs
Court fees, fees for accessing case law, experts, paralegals, etc.
You pay the lawyer and a big portion of that goes towards his costs for additional labour and everything else. A lawyer grossing $2m/year isn't bringing home anything close to that.
That said $250k for a single lawyer for 6 weeks seems high.
You're paying for their experience, just like an engineer - only it's often much higher stakes than a piece of software or product: your livelihood or freedom.
Non "FAANG" (or whatever the new term is) software engineers often make sub-100k even in the US. And regular sw engineers won't break above 500k unless they are managers heading some large team or branch. Getting over 1M is almost superstar level as a sw engineer. If you think it's common, you must be in a tiny SV bubble.
https://www.internationaldisputeresolutionlaw.com/2025/06/en...
I can't find the source right now, but I believe punitive damages are excluded. So all you could collect would be actual damages. What are the actual damages Bambu owners have suffered?
IMHO that kind of stuff would have to go through the WTO but unfortunately Trump gutted that one already way back in his first term.
https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-administration-continues-be-...
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.
It just seems like they don't have that much of a moat which is why they are guarding the software bit as much as they can.
There is no way to stop it beyond getting CBP to block imports, which effectively amounts to shunning.
Unfortunately that seems to increasingly be the status quo these days, look at US companies and their attitude to IP when it suits them to ignore licenses for LLM training purposes.
The US does not respect the EU's Protected Designation of Origin laws because they have more to gain by ignoring them. China has more to gain by ignoring US IP laws.
People want to pretend LLM vector search compaction output isn't copyright and trademark violation. We are in the Napster phase of the market exploitation.
On a positive note there is nothing left of value to steal/scrape, so the problem will likely eventually be self-correcting. =3
Guess how China got their membership in WTO ?
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.
* 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
* 2022-06-29: Evidence. "GPL requires release of source the moment binaries are out. Many people have had the binaries for weeks. They are 100% in violation". [https://x.com/DreadMakerAdam/status/1542216014984876036](https://x.com/DreadMakerAdam/status/1542216014984876036)
* ???
* 2022-07-15: They only dumped it (with prior git history squashed) onto GitHub months after the initial release, after immense community pressure. [https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBambu/comments/1thfslw/comment/...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenBambu/comments/1thfslw/comment/...) [https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/1](https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/1)
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?
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.