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.

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.

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.

Kind of love the irony of this being an xcancel link

> The AGPL is a license. A license without a viable enforcement path is, in practice, a suggestion.

This isn't only a "The distant land of China hasn't been conquered by RMS" problem. The AGPL just isn't very good.

> You don't get to keep the copyleft piece closed by moving it across a function call boundary and calling it a separate work.

You can repeat that however many times you want, it doesn't make it true.

Because the AGPL (and even general GPL) are copyright licenses, they simply do not have anything to say about software that is distributed separately. You can make plugin interfaces and "evil proprietary plugins" all you want. The license has nothing to say about either of those.

The only thing you can't do is ship both the (A)GPL'd software and the "evil proprietary plugin" combined.

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".

The only thing Bambu would have to do is swap their installer for a network installer that downloads both components separately, and they're in the clear.