No offense to LWN -- normally, your articles are well researched and well written, but, sheesh, this one was a total word salad. The full article is 2500 words. It could easily be trimmed by 50% with judicious editing. Literally, I needed to read 1000 (!) words to find this paragraph:
> Bambu Studio would pop up a request to download "a little more stuff" with the classic choices of "Yes" or "Ask me later"; users eventually figure out that some functionality in the slicer does not work until they click "Yes". The extras that are downloaded are two .so files built from C++ source. Those shared-library files are dynamically loaded into the slicer—as can plainly be seen from the dlopen() calls in the source code that was released.
I'm not here to defend Bambu's legal/technical strategy, but they are (IMHO) certainly being immoral (violating open source community standards) but not necessarily unethical (violating software license contract law). This will be a difficult case to win in court. As long as the basic slicer is functional, it is very hard to win this case. The add-ons ("extras") simply make the slicer better.
Several of the claims in the article are also not true.
Bambu Studio was open sourced on GitHub when the printers shipped to Kickstarter backers in 2022, not a year later after pressure from the community like he claims.
Bambu also has an open source page where you can download source for the GPL components in the firmware image, including the kernel. They quote a person who claims this isn’t available and he can’t find anyone to contact, but it’s the first result I see when I google “Bambu labs open source”. It took me 10 seconds to fact check.
I expect some minimal fact checking, not repetition of what someone said at a talk.
