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 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