The Software Freedom Conservancy taking some bold steps to push back against Bambu’s blatant anti-consumerism via (amongst other tactics) violation of AGPLv3.
It’s good that they’re attacking them on the software side, but they should also go after them on the legal side.
Don’t know much about this group, but this seems like a worthwhile cause to contribute to
Another cause is Fulu Foundation, supporting right to repair.
Pretty sure they wrote the AGPL licence
The GPL licenses were all written by the free software foundation for the GNU project. But that doesn’t make it less worthwhile to contribute to this cause, too :)
Written by a company, Funambol.
Approved as open source by the Open Source Initiative.
Published by the Free Software Foundation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License
Yeh, I realise now I misinterpreted an article I read
No, they’re a nonprofit that provides legal support to open source projects.
Ah, ok. I must’ve misinterpreted an article I was reading then. Thanks for the clarification!
Why not using donations to take them to court? Sue them and give money back to OG projects.
Until recently, it was thought that only the copyright holder(s) had legal standing, so unless you could convince them to get involved as the plaintiff you were screwed. I think recently they’ve come up with a legal theory by which any user who was refused the source code could have standing, but it’s a new enough tactic that AFAIK it isn’t very widespread or proven yet.
If they have a case a lawyer will take this for a share of the winnings. You need a few hundred first to send cease and desists, but if those letters don’t work you just add court/lawyer costs to what you are asking.
Part of the challenge here is that Bambu is a Chinese company. Which means you would have to sue them in China, with predictable results.
You could try to sue them in e.g. the US, then use that victory to secure things like import bans, but that’s a very long, slow, and expensive process.
I have no idea what it is that they’ve supposedly done because I don’t really understand the 3D printing space but I’m glad to see that someone’s actually upholding GPL licences because they generally thought that didn’t happen.
My understanding is that they’re withholding part of their source code (which is forbidden by AGPLv3 as described in the article) so that they can keep lock people with their devices into their cloud services (and of course corresponding subscription fees, privacy nightmares, etc.), rather than having the printers able to receive files and print them themselves.
