BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork

I 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...

It'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.

I 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...

Cannot 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.

Its 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.

Kind of love the irony of this being an xcancel link

> The AGPL is a license. A license without a viable enforcement path is, in practice, a suggestion.

This isn't only a "The distant land of China hasn't been conquered by RMS" problem. The AGPL just isn't very good.

> You don't get to keep the copyleft piece closed by moving it across a function call boundary and calling it a separate work.

You can repeat that however many times you want, it doesn't make it true.

Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately. You can make plugin interfaces and "evil proprietary plugins" all you want. The license has nothing to say about either of those.

The only thing you can't do is ship both the (A)GPL'd software and the "evil proprietary plugin" combined.

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".

The only thing Bambu would have to do is swap their installer for a network installer that downloads both components separately, and they're in the clear.