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...
I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be:
- Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it.
- Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through.
It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.
There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats
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.
Open source for medium and small projects is dead if enforcement is a consideration. Trivial to reimplement in same or other language and give yourself plausible deniability.
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.
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...
A license is as enforceable as there are lawyers to advocate for it in court, judges to make rulings for it, and a system of enforcement to make any rulings a reality. Doesn't really matter what's in the license itself.
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.
Western courts have a different perspective since they pretty much universally don't have the larger issue of the Chinese manufacturing as a consideration.
Which is to day you can go to any western court and have import stopped at the border.
> Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately
Of course they can. The nature of any software license boils down to "this work is protected by copyright. If you comply to A, B and C, you can do D, E and F that otherwise would have violated copyright law". A, B and C can be whatever you want. It can be "don't use this in nuclear power plants" (MS likes that condition), it can be "if you make less than $100k anually" (Unity etc), or it can be "if you share the source code" (copyleft). You can make that clause as wide or unrelated as you want
The real issue with GPL and AGPL is how badly defined the boundary is unless you have a single compiled C program
> 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".
No, the plugin is downloaded at runtime on first launch
The amount of outright obfuscation with this issue is absurd. Either many of the big names that have jumped on the bandwagon are credulous idiots or deliberately misrepresenting what has happened for their own gain.
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...
I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be:
- Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it.
- Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through.
It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.
There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats
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.
Software Freedom Conservancy is at least fighting back.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...
Open source for medium and small projects is dead if enforcement is a consideration. Trivial to reimplement in same or other language and give yourself plausible deniability.
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.
Your cloud act is making American cloud vendors lose customers in droves
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...
A license is as enforceable as there are lawyers to advocate for it in court, judges to make rulings for it, and a system of enforcement to make any rulings a reality. Doesn't really matter what's in the license itself.
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.
Western courts have a different perspective since they pretty much universally don't have the larger issue of the Chinese manufacturing as a consideration.
Which is to day you can go to any western court and have import stopped at the border.
Kind of love the irony of this being an xcancel link
This post is now gone. Click the down button and stop reading.
It seems we have arrived at the "HN does not read license texts" hour again.
> Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately
Of course they can. The nature of any software license boils down to "this work is protected by copyright. If you comply to A, B and C, you can do D, E and F that otherwise would have violated copyright law". A, B and C can be whatever you want. It can be "don't use this in nuclear power plants" (MS likes that condition), it can be "if you make less than $100k anually" (Unity etc), or it can be "if you share the source code" (copyleft). You can make that clause as wide or unrelated as you want
The real issue with GPL and AGPL is how badly defined the boundary is unless you have a single compiled C program
> 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".
No, the plugin is downloaded at runtime on first launch
The amount of outright obfuscation with this issue is absurd. Either many of the big names that have jumped on the bandwagon are credulous idiots or deliberately misrepresenting what has happened for their own gain.