Posted by Velocifyer 13 hours ago
I understand Snapmaker has been getting some good press lately (especially the Snapmaker U1), and it would be cheaper than the equivalent Prusa and they are more open than Bambu (so far) in their deals with open source.
My only personal experience is with Prusa (and I'm a happy customer). Their machines are also built to be serviable, which matters for print farm style usage, I have heard that a Bambu just doesn't last more than a year or two in that environment. Prusas just keep going as long as you lube the bearings every now and then.
$750 vs $1,750 is not a bit more...
[0] P2S with AMS vs Core One + MMU
Any import block would be on the hardware, not the software. And the software would need to be released for other territories anyway.
Or they can pay statutory maximum copyright violations of $120000 per copy violated.
Per copy.
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)
If your response is "Let's force TPP-style international trade courts to force AGPL compliance", well, you're the globalist that Bernie Sanders rightfully warned about and people like trump pretended/lied about being against as justification for why they get elected. I hope you never get what you want. The same crap will be used to patent surgical procedures and other IP in ways that are horrible for society.
You want to do fake software viral communism that's incompatible with how the legal system operates? You're poor as shit and can't hire good lawyers vs business because capitalism isn't favorable to you? That's why you're supposed to engineer something better than crapitalism. This is a grand challenge for the FOSS movement and why I am still broadly supportive of the reasons why someone like RMS votes/voted for the green party (and yes I know they are these days loony/crazy/compromised by the FSB)
Real FOSS is MIT. Learn to make your fake viral communist license have teeth or forever persist in this doomed world you have created.
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.
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 ensure they weren't going to violate the GPL. And yet a rogue employee, unknown to the rest of the company, violated it despite being told not to. I don't know exactly what the courts will decide in this case. It's still going to come down to the copyright violation. However, it likely won't be a source code release. The GPL will hold up, they will just say the written requirements are to much and ??? . But again, this will only happen after the courts take a very detailed look at all the things the company is doing to ensure they didn't violate the GPL in the first place, which means we are likely looking at many, many years before the first such case. Anyone who isn't aware of the GPL and taking a lot of active effort to ensure they're not violating it, they won't be able to pull off this defense after the fact.
I would expect a court to compell a defendant to either comply with the license or cease distribution and possibly pay damages for unauthorized distribution... But I don't know that there's a good way to figure the damages and US statuatory damages likely don't apply because who registers their copyrights for open source code (or deposits copies with the Library of Congress)?
Infringement by a rouge employee, acting against policy, may be reason to limit punitve damages and stick to actual damages... But if it's an actual rogue employee acting against policy, I would expect the company to cease infringement, begin compliance, or negotiate for an alternative solution once notified about the issue anyway.
That is not what people are asking for.