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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

It's been pretty weird and disappointing to see the way Bambu has taken over with these practices.

If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.

Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.

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Haven't these (A)GPL violations been there for most of the company's history? It's the context around them that changed.

While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that

> apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is it's meant to block this kind of behavior. Certainly it's against the spirit of it.

> and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source

But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.

It's a shame because the Bambu product line is genuinely first class. They don't need to play these games to compete, and could have won a lot of genuine good will by giving a little back to the community.

Bambu and Prusa are both engaged in harm.

But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.

What's Prusa doing wrong?

The Open Community Licence is a horrible mistake, even with the recent modifications.

Prusa was always great on these issues, even their printers were open source

it's hard to convince people to past over bambu when the alternative is either: Crappier (Ender, Creality), or much more expensive (Prusa).

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