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Comment by galaxyLogic | Hacker News Reader

This interpretation would mean that you could not produce AGPL licensed code which loads some code in dynamically. Like say you couldn't have an AGPL licensed web-browser which sometimes loads pages whose JavaScript's source-code is obscured. ?

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Let's not speak in absolutes like that you (absolutely) "could not" do this. Most matters depend on the specific context of the situation.

The example you mention about a browser and JavaScript on web pages is a very different situation. A browser can be used to interpret and render any number of web pages and is not in any way tied to a specific web page.

This situation with Bambu is not at all the same. Bambu Studio and their networking plugin are very tightly coupled, to the point that they share in-memory data structures. There is no generic plugin architecture; it's a one-to-one interface where the AGPL side of the code explicitly names, downloads at runtime, and is versioned alongside that networking plugin. Most of Bambu Studio's major features beyond generating sliced gcode do not work without the plugin.

Yes, carving out a chunk that you wish to keep proprietary and then dynamically loading it into AGPL code to try and circumvent the AGPL license's explicit copyleft features is an AGPL violation. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins for one fairly clear explanation of this.

Or you can read the Software Freedom Conservancy's take on this exact controversy, now one day later, in which they are unequivocal that this is an AGPL violation: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...

Software licensing disputes have almost nothing to do with the technical mechanism that loads the code into RAM. The court will look at the totality of the facts: what is the product, how is it normally operated, who is selling it. There's a lot more common sense involved than programmers like to think (but it's not completely about common sense).

For example the Nvidia driver gets to ignore the Linux kernel license because even though it links with the kernel, when considered as a complete package it's not a derivative work of the kernel. It is its own product that can be plugged into various kernels such as Windows and Linux, and the small adapter layer for each kernel doesn't change that.

Some German court even once interpreted GPLv2 to prohibit tivoization.

Some links about GPL & TiVo:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

The networking code is not some 3rd party content that happens to be loaded. It’s an integral part of bambu studio, and if you don’t install it, large parts of the apps functionality won’t work.

By a common sense view it is not a plugin at all, it’s part of the app that they have structured in a weird way to try to avoid the obvious license violation.

IIRC the difference is the effective requirement of having it for the intended function of the software; To whit: Printing to a Bambu printer. It's a legal gray area but the general legal consensus as I understand it is that the dynamic loading is enough most of the time up to the point where it's a requirement for functionality.

Of course, IANAL and just a random passerby with a SUPER rough understanding.

This is not like a web browser, Bambu Studio requires the networking plugin to function, it explicitly depends on the services provided by a specific plug-in therefore it's not a plug-in at all, except in name.

What you're describing is probably a gray area, the closest example I can think of is the Wordpress plugin ecosystem (GPLv2+).

AFAIK, the code of the network "plugin" is dynamically loaded, but the version string is hardcoded in Bambu Studio. The analogy is not exactly right IMO; the browser is not restricted to a specific website or a specific version of that site.

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