Technology

There is one thing everyone misses in this pissing contest. Bambu is a Chinese company. So any lawsuit will probably need to take place in China. It ain't happening in the US or the Europe. So, guess who wins.......

Josef Prusa wrote a blog post, recently about this. I have to apologize that I can't seem to find a link to it right now. But the gist of it is.

Bambu forked Prusa Slicer and had to be threatened to publish the code for the fork by Prusa the company, "stealing" ideas and claiming it your own is just good business in China, because the code is all AGPL.

But Bambu has a problem now. The Chinese government requires access to their technology and cloud. Because one way or another, the Chinese government requires access to any industries tech under "National Security". So Bambu can't allow access to 3rd party actors in this case because the government can't control the access of the outside code, which makes it illegal.

So Bambu has screwed themselves by forking an open source project that requires anyone to have access to the code and be able to use that code and make changes to that code. That the Chinese government doesn't allow. And Bambu didn't pay attention and let that little snippet of code that is under contention loose under the AGPL. As I have claimed all along, Bambu does not have the smartest coders on payroll.

But Bambu is pretty sure the Chinese courts have their back in this matter. In the past, Prusa has seriously considered going after Bambu in court. But the Prusa's lawyers know they can't win no matter how righteous the case because, well China. And Prusa most likely has access to much better lawyers than Rossmann does. So this ain't going nowhere.

Josef Prusa is very angry because it's evident the AGPL means nothing if it can't be enforced and Bambu is worried that it will get screwed over in the market because they could lose a lot of sales over this. Or even get their products banned in some countries. Or not. Many Bambu fans seem to care very little about it. Because just use "Developer Mode" without understanding the deeper implications. And that it's not really any protection.

I was pretty close to buying a P2S until I saw Jeff Geerlings latest video, which led me to Rossmanns. Bambu labs obviously hates its users, why would I give them my money?

(Premise: I don’t have a 3D Printer, have next to zero experience using one and never heard of this controversy before. I’m just asking out of curiosity)

I’m in favor of people using open-source software to use better the stuff they bought, but putting aside my bias that seems pretty clearly an illegal thing, can someone ELI5 how could they not lose if they’re sued?

What I understood is that Bambu Lab sold those printers advertising cloud access to their proprietary servers through their “official means”, but a lot of people used unofficial open-source software to access it, because it worked better. Then at a certain point, the company disabled access to apps that weren’t their proprietary one, but people kept using them. Which prompted the company to sue.

It’s an ass move to do, but the open-source software wasn’t officially supported even before, right? And now it’s still used to access their company cloud, not a separate one, right?

From my understanding they didn’t remove any functionality that was officially advertised, and people are now using unauthorized software to access the company’s proprietary cloud, did I misunderstand something?