There’s a pile of people that swore of Ubiquiti when they tried to cloud-mandatory their network and camera stuff. It blew up in their face and they backed off.

I think it’s attempting to be honest about how the courts would look at this issue. What is obvious to the average 3D printing advocate may not always be obvious to the average 75 year old copyright judge who struggles to use his laptop.

I don’t like how gentle the article was with Bambu, because it definitely glossed over a lot of the more frightening “Bambu threatened to try to get him sent to federal prison” stuff. But it seems like the article was trying to anticipate some of the arguments and types of evidence Bambu could try to use in court to weasel out of being forced to release all their code under AGPL. This is why even something as ironclad as AGPL isn’t truly ironclad until after it is tested by the courts and precedents have been set. Bambu’s lawyers will look at AGPL like a genie trying to twist a wish, and will attempt to find ways to circumvent it. And the only person they’d need to convince is the judge, who probably doesn’t know anything about programming.

And that’s exactly how an MBA focused on enshittification and value-extraction would tend to look at the current scenario. Less “what is the right thing to do” and more “what will the courts allow us to do, now that everyone already owns our product?”

To be clear, I 100% agree that this is a very black and white issue, with Bambu absolutely in the wrong. But the courts probably won’t see it that way, and that battle will need to be fought before anything is actually settled. And there is the chance that Bambu wins the case and undermines AGPL, because I have absolutely zero faith that the courts will see it as a straightforward issue if a company actually tries to fight it.

If you do upgrade, I can happily recommend Prusa Printers. I have an MK3S+ that has been bulletproof for years. I went the route of building a kit as its a bit cheaper, but it took very little effort once it was all together to get it printing nearly flawlessly. And from what I have heard, if you buy the assembled printers they are pretty much ready out of the box.

There are other printers on the market that may be bigger, faster, or better in other ways. Prusa seems to be supportive of the open source community, and if there is any reason to dislike them I’m unaware of it. I think the biggest hit against them is the cost, but I feel like its been worth it to have a versatile and frustration free printer.