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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

It was really depressing when I realized that people will buy a sketchy product which is hurting the community and makers of non-sketchy products because "its cheaper and its not like my purchase is gonna change things one way or another."

It is selfish and short sighted, and it leaves their future impoverished, but in the moment they "got a good deal."

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It's not worth engaging in the debate. People have complained that Prusa printers are expensive since forever, even when the MK3 was objectively superior to the alternative models. They would rather buy a $200 Ender and spend a lifetime tinkering with it.

Prusa have their own ongoing GPL violation https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Prusa_Research

I think it's a bit iffy to argue that the bootloader code is covered by the GPLv3. In programs for standard computers running a big OS, the distinction lies in whether you are linking a library into your program. If the GPL code isn't a library but an external program, it isn't linking, and OK by the GPL. Now on to the bootloader code: in order to flash your device you have to put everything into a single image file. I guess the claim is that this process constitutes linking. But I don't think that is how most people think. Some possible arguments:

When linking, symbols pointing to addresses are involved. The main program calls functions in the library, and you end up with a whole program. On the other hand, a bootloader just does its thing and then jumps to a fixed address in the main program. The main program doesn't call anything in the bootloader. (Note, the Linux kernel has a special clause that explicitly allows the userland to programmatically interface with the kernel.)

I realize this sort of depends on the microcontroller toolchain. I'm familiar with a few, but not much with STM32 stuff. If the toolchain is dumb and implements the bootloader in a way that resembles linking, i.e. making it possible to resolve all the symbols in the bootloader from the main program then it could very well make the bootloader subject to the GPL.

Even as far as linking goes... If you're not actually deriving from the code in a copyright sense then the GPL is limited in what it can demand. The advice from the FSF on linking is not exactly unbiased. The part about the intimacy of the communication between pieces of code seems a lot more solidly based in copyright law.

> This allegedly violates the GPLv3 clause that requires the release of the source code for the entire work if they are combined to form a larger program in or on a storage or distribution medium, such as the flash memory of the STM32F407 micro-controller on the board, and more recently in the update images Prusa supplies

This makes 0 sense as presented here. The GPL explicitly distinguishes mere aggregation from combining in a way that makes it a larger program. Putting both the proprietary bootloader and the GPL OS on the same disk / in the same system makes 0 difference to whether the bootloader is covered by the GPL or not.

If this were true, then any phone, any PS5, any Linux laptop, and almost all consumer hardware would be in violation of the GPL (note that the wording quoted there is also part of the GPLv2, it's not GPLv3 specific).

Unfortunately this comment entirely misses the mark.

The reason this is such a big deal is precisely because it's not a sketchy product. For people who are using their FDM printers for more than just minifigs from thingiverse there's no proper alternative to Bambu. Their hardware and software is significantly ahead of the competition.

If you want to print engineering-grade plastics reliably and accurately you are going to need a Bambu device, or drop 5 figures on a commercial machine. Those are the alternatives. Very few other firms offer consistent, accurate, high temperature printing - and the few that do, don't have the software to manage vibrations, flow control and thousands of other parameters well enough to get consistent hiqh quality results.

Some examples: Prusa have the One+, and good software management. But the "heated chamber" is actually just a fan attached to the underside of the bed, which means that the chamber temperature is not consistent across the volume, leading to poor quality products. There's a few niche devices from people like Qidi, but they don't have the build and software quality to get reliable, repeatable results.

Overall if you're trying to solve actual problems with your FDM device, rather than messing around as a hobby you need a tool that just works, and that can handle materials like PA12, PET and PC. Bambu are really the only sensible choice for this. Yes, I'd be far far happier if the software was really FOSS (the encrypted non-user-readable logs enrage me!), but overall it's a tool not a hobby. I don't have a sensible alternative.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but I think you may have unintentionally made my point.

Try this: Change the context "Acme's Sunscreen which is made from killing an endangered fish, is significantly better than any other sunscreen out there, and because it is already on fish we know it doesn't hurt the ocean!" except the production of Acme Sunscreen is leading to the extinction of said fish in the future. Short term profits, long term loss, and perhaps a bet that at some point what ever it is about the fish that makes great sunscreen will be figured out.

Using FOSS requires (by license) that you give back your changes, which, when functional prevents a vendor from exploiting the work of a bunch of people they didn't pay, to make a product where they pay a few people to push it way past what the community offers. Whereas if they had been publishing their changes, then their product wouldn't be "significantly ahead" because everyone using the same slicer base code would be able to also use Bambu's improvements. But Bambu doesn't do that because why let the competitors take advantage of the work of people who they didn't compensate for that work. Hmmm?

See how that works?

Except that the software part of the "significantly ahead" is in the device firmware, not the slicer. And it's only the slicer that's at issue in this debate. If it were the slicer that provided all this advantage over the competition it'd have been copied years ago, so this is really nothing to do with my point at all.

Again, I'd be far happier if they followed the terms of the AGPL and provided source for their custom slicing extensions, but it wouldn't really move the needle very much for the competition.

You realize that the slicer has to talk to the firmware, and it is documenting the commands their firmware implements which makes the combination of slicer + firmware print right? The whole point of the AGPL on the slicer was to prevent people from having special sauce printer firmware, get all the work of the slicer for "free" and then make their combination better than everyone else's. So you publish the code the slicer uses to talk to your device and that lets someone else implement the same codes (if they choose too).

I think it's reached commodity status instead of community... 3D printing I mean. At that point only thing that matters is ease of use, price, and quality of the result. People who are not _in_ the community but use the tool.

And then there are there dozens (or hundreds?) of influences ignorantly accepting sponsorships.

This is exactly what people engaged in surveillance capitalism is trying to achieve. Sell hardware/software at a loss, push out the competition that does things legitimately and then continue there engagement in profiling everyone for profit.

I did a presentation[0] on this about a month back. If we want these situations to stop we need to work to inform the public and work towards getting people that care in positions of power.

[0]: https://www.scottrlarson.com/presentations/overcoming-survei...

These days power both corrupts and causes burnout.

Power doesn't corrupt. It Reveals. We have been sold that idea to keep the people who don't deserve it, in power.

What community? It's a tool.

You can't really spit in the hobby 3d printing world without hitting the community. I have coworkers who talk about their printers, filament choice, what they've printed recently, etc etc. I've been around hackerspaces with that behavior for over a decade, but it spontaneously showed up at work from a shared interest.

That community is where open source tech tends to come from.

I know the community well, I was challenging the assertion this hurts the community. On the contrary, better and cheaper printers help the community way more than the worries over software licensing. The average person doesn't care, they want a printer that works and doesn't cost much.

Its not only a licensing issue, but they abuse this closed source binary to lock away major features from other slicers (DRM, signature checks), hinder development, include anti-debugging, telemetry, encrypt logs and configs, etc.

And the stock plugin ships an unaligned atomic that triggers the kernel's split_lock detector on every modern Intel CPU. Startup stalls for 25-60 seconds while the kernel walks each trap; every Device-tab click hits it again. The workaround (sysctl kernel.split_lock_mitigate=0) degrades system-wide performance and still misbehaves in LAN-only mode. Reported to Bambu over a year ago and still open: bambulab/BambuStudio#8605.

And no ARM or non-x86_64 build

Again, the average person does not care about any of that. They will use the Bambu slicer (if even, I bet many only print from their phones with the app). They aren't aware of, nor do they care about, anti-debugging, telemetry, encrypted logs, or anything of that nature. Most who do use the slicer will probably be on Windows, not Linux, and on an x86_64 machine. Why is any of this a surprise? It's an appliance, not something to hack on. It would be one thing if it was presented that way, like the Prusas, but it is explicitly sold as a turnkey machine. If you don't like that, you can buy a printer from one of their many competitors, or build a printer yourself, Bambu is not stopping you.

Even folks in the industrial space are part of the community I tend to find. Most people my age found their way in through the open source community.

Is the product sketchy or just their practices from your point of view?

I think a valid view (not saying it's right) of this is: "some dorks in a country I don't inhabit gave away valuable code. I'm going to use it and I don't particularly care about what they think about it"

How much do you care about Chinese law? does that make you sketchy?

Inevitably the situation is the "sketch" here is that the vendor avoids a cost by creatively interpreting the requirements. It became famously difficult to buy a reliable PC power supply at one point because PSU vendors were all trying to cut costs and undercut each other. When there isn't a lot of market differentiation features, people differentiate on price. At NetApp we got more and more prescriptive in our contracts with motherboard OEMs because they would do silly things like "leave off 1/2 the bypass capacitors" which would then cause the filer to fail in some environments. And I get that "its just business"

It's an easy thing to avoid the costs associated with complying with FOSS licenses because they FOSS people don't come after you. So instead of having a person on staff who is making sure the company is compliant and updating the web site with source as it changes etc etc. You just don't do any of that and not only do you save money not paying that person you don't have to bother the web site people every time you do a software update. So from a manufacturer's perspective it's a win.

That said, Chinese vendors selling to Chinese customers following Chinese law. All good. Chinese vendors selling to US customers and not following US law, that's bad. I don't see how Chinese law would be part of that discussion.

Yes openly breaking Chinese law in a manner that is in breach of international convention or otherwise has wider consequences (breaking rules about keeping information from the party doesn't count unless I'm there: our privacy laws override) would make us sketchy. Can you name a company that has done that, or are you pulling an idea out of your hat because your argument otherwise lacks supporting facts/evidence?

What makes them particularly sketchy is the hypocracy: they fully understand the concept of IP and they are using/abusing it to try defend their semi-walled garden.

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