I realize this is a bad weekend to ask for the communities help. But I’m crashing out and need some support.
I only have two cousins, and this is the one I grew up around. If you can help please. She’s an amazing happy, positive person with two kids. Her kids are just finishing college and are super successful.
Her Daughter is taking point on everything. And she setup the go fund me.
If you can donate please. 🙏 it would mean the world to me
https://t.co/fJRKQHenjv
What does the PrusaSlicer AGPL violation actually look like?
PS is licensed under AGPL-3.0. That's the strongest copyleft license there is. It's simple: you can fork it, you can build a business on it, you can ship it commercially. But any derivative work has to stay open source too. You take from the community, you give back to the community. That's the social contract. PS is a fork of Slic3r and even though 90+% of the codebase is now written by us, we are proud about the heritage.
BambuStudio (BS) is a fork of PrusaSlicer (PS). They published the slicer parts, that's fine. The networking plugin, the part that actually talks to their cloud, is closed-source. Just a binary black-box.
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. They are not two products that happen to talk to each other, they are one product split across two files for PR license-laundering convenience 😒
Under AGPL, that's still a violation. You don't get to keep the copyleft piece closed by moving it across a function call boundary and calling it a separate work. The license they inherited from us doesn't allow that. The OrcaSlicer inherited the same license by forking BS and follows the rules.
Most people miss that the networking blob isn't even bundled inside BS. It downloads itself at runtime.
So you can audit BambuStudio's open source code all you want. You cannot meaningfully audit the part that actually talks to the cloud. It lives outside the published software supply chain, arrives from a CDN you don't control, and can be replaced from one launch to the next without anyone outside Bambu having a chance to look at it first 😬
I flagged this exact architecture publicly in March 2023. The same architecture is in place today.
https://t.co/IAvc2Tmqh6
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.
The AGPL is a license. A license without a viable enforcement path is, in practice, a suggestion.
So Bambu got away with it. The networking blob kept doing whatever it does. And many “we are sorry”s later we land here today - legal threats to a small developer opening their tiny black box 🤦♂️ 3/x
A funny story from the very beginning, because I want to be clear how long this has been on our radar.
PrusaSlicer 2.4 introduced opt-in anonymous telemetry. Shortly after release, we started seeing entries in our database labeled "BambuSlicer." We hadn't heard of BambuStudio yet. Their internal builds were accidentally configured to send telemetry to our servers instead of theirs 🤭
That's how we found out a fork existed, before they publicly launched. And after launch the community had to call out BambuLab to release the BambuStudio source code in accordance with the AGPL license https://t.co/wQg0EWxmsy
We've known what this software is and where it came from since day one.
https://t.co/0mMqay130u 4/4
@josefprusa The new Bambu printer is everyone in this communities chance to send a clear message. The problem is the sheeple, and the users who don’t fully understand the meaning of all this coding language will ignore it
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I have been searching for ONE solid case of a Bambu catching fire and I haven’t seen one yet. Can someone point me in the direction.
I am a little gun shy with this from Grant. He did this with the decoded Bambu logs too. He said “TURN YOUR BAMBUS OFF NOW”… implying they were spying on us, or ??? He actually never said. Eventually he made some half assed video trying to explain his panic and it still didn’t warrant his response. In that case he made the claims, scared everyone and then when it went viral he ran and hid from it. Claiming he was getting death threats. Again never heard if there was any truth to that too.
Now he’s making a huge deal about this. Is it concerning sure. But there’s millions of these machines in the wild. It’s a rounding error of ones that even got hot spots. Were they in Wham Bam hot box enclosures? There’s so much to know to make an informed decision.
But just like before I can’t find one creditable and verifiable result of real fire and/damage. I don’t know 🤷♂️
This only gets fixed if the consumers care and get pissed off. I would gladly change my H2C, H2D, P1S, et al for @josefprusa machines. I am so disappointed with their newest generation printers. My issues are outside of the GPL violations. They just don’t perform like they should for $3,000 printers. My H2C is a toolchanger that poops a lot and is slow. AMS’s are not the answer and Bambu keeps requiring them.
Anyone want to trade? I swear I would trade my h series for a Core One L with INDX…
@JoshMurrah@thiagolocatelli Most people argue it’s not a toolchanger. Because it’s a toolchanger that’s just as slow as a X1C because they built in their profits for years to come by requiring those stupid AMS’s
@JoshMurrah That’s not true. I bought my last Bambu last year and I have been just fine. @QIDI_3dprinter believe or not makes a better machine, more capable, and less cost. I only take Bambu at this point for comparison reasons for TikTok shop.
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