I think you are underestimating how many companies use 3D printing for prototyping. It's not just hobbyists printing miniatures.

To give an example, I had RSI and use a high-end, expensive ergonomic keyboard. The company that makes these keyboards does not go immediately from design idea to an expensive mold. There are many design iterations and prototypes and they are all 3D prints.

The same is probably true for air humidifiers, drones, or whatever other object you can come up with.

If you have access to everyone's STLs, you basically have access to all the design prototypes and something close to the final product.

It's like industrial espionage, except companies are willingly giving you the data, because they do not want to spend the extra money for a farm of Prusa printers.

It's a brilliant play of the Chinese government. Exploiting that we prefer short-term savings over long-term strategy.

This pattern repeats over and over again, from 3D printers to people buying Chinese fitness watches because they are cheaper than EU and US counterparts.

Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government.

The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.

The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China.

After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it.

So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit.

In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction.

It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch.

They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.

This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment.

She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.

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

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.

Your cloud act is making American cloud vendors lose customers in droves

> License can not order someone to publish something.

No it can't, you are right.

By default, you don't have any right to use any given software. The license outlines the conditions under which you have are permitted to use it. If you don't comply with the conditions, you aren't permitted to use it.

The license isn't ordering you to do anything, you can simply not use the software!

accepting AGPL means you're vowing to publish derivative work. if you aren't legally allowed to publish that work, you violated its terms. the Court may not order you to publish to cure the violation, if you lack the rights to do so, but they can still order you to pay damages.

if I sign a contract saying I'll produce a million Iron Man action figures, but I don't have the IP for Iron Man, I can't just shrug my shoulders and say "well, you can't make me." the Court would make me pay damages.

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.

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.

Its a company. They don't give a single flying fuck.

What is the irony here?

> 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.

Copyleft is about freedom of consumers to make whatever choice fits their target, unlike permissive licensing, which is about freedom of corporations to take away freedom of consumers.