An ongoing 3D-printer AGPL violation
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LWN counts on its subscribing readers to support its mission of creating relevant human-written news coverage of the Linux and free-software communities. Please subscribe to LWN and help to keep us on the net. As a special offer, subscribe to LWN now for at least six months, and receive a 25% discount on your subscription. [+] Proceed to the article By Jake Edge August 26, 2026 FOSSY At FOSSY 2026 , several people from the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), which organizes the conference, gave a presentation about an ongoing violation of the Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3). Bradley Kühn, Karen Sandler, and Denver Gingerich spoke about different aspects of the violation, which is in regard to 3D-printer software from Bambu Lab, and what is being done to try to provide users with alternatives. One aspect that is particularly interesting is that the circumvention that the company is employing is precisely what the AGPL was written to prevent.
Kühn began the session by noting that he has been an activist in the free and open-source software (FOSS) communities for over 30 years and that " this moment in history [...] has more activism opportunities than I have seen in my career ". In the past, he and his colleagues have been triaging disasters of various sorts but over the past six to eight months they have been triaging opportunities instead. Sandler added that the opportunities being offered are difficult; " it's not like people are saying 'would you like this money or that money?' ".
The opportunities he is describing are not really about money, Kühn said, but provide ways " for activists to get stuff done and to engage people ". Over the past six months or so, SFC has successfully engaged with " an entire community of enthusiasts ", which only had a passing familiarity with FOSS, on a multitude of freedom-centric topics: " free software, free culture, free creation ". That is exciting, but he was getting ahead of himself because that is where the story ends, so he wanted to go back to the beginning.
Some time ago, 3D printing was invented, which is something that he watched from afar; a breadboard fire when he was an undergraduate convinced him that he should be a software-only person. He is a fan of the 3D-printing culture, and enjoys the talks that come from it, but he does not participate. As part of the license-violation investigation, he and Gingerich did a crash course in the history of 3D-printing, though Gingerich already had much of the background.
Kühn related some of what he learned, including that the hobbyist 3D-printing field started out as a curiosity. People who wanted a 3D printer had to build one themselves, since there were no already assembled devices on the market. Some of those who built the early printers went on to found companies that now sell 3D printers, which is a key element in the development of the community. Like Linux, 3D printers started as a hobby and remained " a hobby for a long-enough period of time that the hobby culture could not be immediately eradicated by venture capitalists ".
The " wonderful thing " about 3D printing is that the people developing the software needed to run the devices looked to the free-software community and " thought twice " before they started picking licenses for their code. An important piece of the tooling needed to use these devices is a program known as a " slicer ", which turns a 3D model—some slicers also help build these models—into thin 2D slices that can be converted into the language that the printer hardware understands. He likens that language to assembly language, which is an oversimplification, but helps provide a conceptual framework for him.