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Louis Rossmann taunts Bambu Lab by hosting banned 3D Printer firmware fork, dares $1 billion company to sue him — more creators pledge support and boycotts, Snapmaker donates equipment to embattled de (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 17 points 4 months ago (6 children)

That's not strictly accurate.

The slicer is Open Source yes, but not the printer firmware or software. That's closed source and proprietary to Bambu.

Now there's some contention there because a lot of the features and ideas that make modern 3D printing as reliable and great were developed in the open, under open source licenses and Bambu has definitely implemented many of them in their printer firmware, but they don't infringe any licenses in the printer software itself (as far as anyone is aware).

This whole debacle centres around the slicing software, which is separate from the printer itself (though is necessary to actually use the printer) and it's AGPL.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    The slicer is Open Source yes, but not the printer firmware or software.

    The firmware is not unlikely to be linux-based. And hardware drivers for Linux are part of the kernel which is under GPL license.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Not if they're kernel modules, written from scratch, afaik

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's not how it works. Kernel modules are part of the kernel and need to adhere to its license, which is GPLv2.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    Of my saturdaymorning brain understands this correctly you might in fact be right https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLStaticVsDynamic

    Edit: however: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/comments/1hdwm04/comment/m1zmt9d/ and https://docs.kernel.org/process/license-rules.html#id1

    So I feel like this is definitely still possible and 'legal' depending on the implementation. Nvidia and AMD have done it for years.

    IANAL though :p

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