Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government.
The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.
The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China.
After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it.
So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit.
In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction.
It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch.
They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.
This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment.
She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.
> They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.
Copyright is not some kind of spiritual nonsense. It's law. You don't need to understand how, you just need to follow it. There can be legal questions on what exactly you can do, but those can arise for any kind of law.
Of course you could also ignore copyright law - but that's the same with any other law.
The internet is largely predicated on American law, because so much of it has been invented by Americans.
The EFF, Creative Commons, FSF - they're all based in America. The licenses they write are based on American legal concepts.
It's interesting to see a Czech CEO commenting on (and quoting) and English translation of Chinese law in the context of a license written in America. As he points out in the thread, AGPL is unenforceable against a Chinese company if China doesn't recognize the rights AGPL is predicated on.
I would have guessed as much. I don’t understand why the west allows Chinese firms to act on their contracts a law when interacting with their markets. There is no reason to allow Bamboo to continue selling in North America or Europe if they’re out of compliance here. Sales can be blocked until compliance with local laws.
Companies are not moral. They will only follows laws when they are enforceable either thru the law, or thru social blowback. That’s not a chinese vs western thing, western companies are just as happy to ignore the law when they can - it’s just western IP frameworks are historically better enforced (socially and legally) in the west.
I'm not sure it's so innocent. Bambu labs is a major company that hires grads out of top US schools. I'm pretty sure they have lots of people there who understand the concept of open source, including the license requirements, and who would have been raising these questions internally.
> The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source.
Except that Bambu is not a small player in the game, and they made threats of using the DMCA which shows they are fully aware of "western" IP law and the nature of licenses, Open or otherwise.
Aren't you saying the same thing as parent? The expectation is usually NOT to send DMCA notices, so if they do, doesn't that also allude to what parent said, that they don't understand the expectations around open source?
They understood enough to know that they could not claim a license violation but invoking the DCMA, specifically the part about bypassing digital locks, they could intimidate a developer.
American lawmakers and politicians are technologically ignorant, and Americans in general see programmers as existing on a spectrum with boring nerds on one end and hackers on the other. Bambu was betting on easy support by painting the developer as a hacker who was "reverse engineering" their "safety features". What Bambu failed to understand is that the people who make and use Open software are not average Americans, they are tech savvy, interested, and loud.
> The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.
Apparently until someone finds the things you make available to use and uses them to circumvent your own forced limitation on the product.
Sending cease and desists to developers using AGPL code has nothing to do with any mindset other than bold faced greed. While China has been the source of many ancient inventions, I doubt they invented greed.
It's just good business. They know intellectual property is only meaningfully enforced outside China against entities outside China, why wouldn't they use that competitive advantage? I don't buy they are clueless about that, BambuLabs is built for global distribution, they know what they're doing. They may play dumb about the issue (because that's good PR practice), but they'll have decided they can ignore that license and they'll be right in the long run.
Sorry, but this is just horse shit. I grew up in Soviet Union and we "didn't understand" open source, IP etc either. It wasn't because of some cultural or whatever reasons, it was purely by economical and political reasons. We didn't have money to buy any software. When I got my first ZX Spectrum clone in 1990, any game would cost me my monthly salary, university I worked for ran stolen SCO because it was illegal even to have in Soviet Union etc etc. And of course everyone was used to steal anyway and it was even more acceptable to steal from them. But it took only a decade and all this stuff was left behind.
And Chinese government and companies clearly understand Open Source. They support open licenses, standardsm, software and hardware wherever it benefits them – mostly by making western competitors relying on IP and licensing weaker.
There are cultural differences in attitudes toward individual ownership of IP under communism. It is a recent change for China firms to bother getting international patents and trademarks.
Naomi Wu made herself notable in media, and in China "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Unfortunate, as she seemed like a real entrepreneurial leader with skill. =3
And who was it that put her in that situation? An American Journalist that didn't respect boundaries even after it was made clear to them that this would cause issues for her in China.
> Vice published a profile on Wu that included personal details regarding her sexual orientation, which she had explicitly asked them to keep off the record out of fear of state censorship and government retaliation in China.
only because China is at a point where they are producing technology and they don't want others stealing from them like they've been stealing for years
No they haven’t.
Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Enforcement is another things but photographers and artists have had ways to push back against illicit use of their work, notably by larger corporations. Licensing is an industry based on this protection alone.
The difference is that now, large corporations with plenty of money are able to just swallow other people’s work and pretend it’s “fair use” and derivative enough that they wash their hand of the fact that their models, that they charge lots of money for, would not be able to output anything they were not trained on. At least you could argue that a large image model would have a hard time creating a picture of a cat if it hadn’t been fed pictures of cats that belonged to other people than the company producing the model.
I don’t know if training on the world’s data without compensation is fair or not. There are valid arguments both ways, but as an individual, it should still be your choice whether you want to allow your work to be used in ways you do not agree with.
I think people at large expect at least recognition, and if possible, compensation, for their creations.
When a consumption system is built around providing neither, I don’t think we should be surprised that people feel slighted.
> Copyright protected you against your work being used in ways you did not agree to.
Is this true? Remember that Harlan Ellison plagiarism case, the nightmare he went through to get a payout? It seems the vast majority of times, when a corporation decides it wants to use something you created, it gets to just do so because it has more capital than you.
I'm a previous career, I was a professional photographer. I spent a lot of time chasing after companies that operated with the "if it's in the internet, it must be free" mindset. The right letters, sent the right way, to the right people almost always gets things fixed.
In one example, a very major bank used one of my photos as the cover of a corporate report. That mistake paid my rent for a little over a year.
Most major corporations are not stupid enough to do that though, and if they do, their lawyers will tell them to just settle and the responsible person (or a scapegoat) will quietly move on. Far more likely it's some random blogger or low-rent publication grabbing stuff off the Internet.
Yes. A side effect of the expansion of copyright enforcement pushed by larger corporations means that companies generally are walking on eggshells and have streamlined processes to remove content based on a standardized compliant process. Even more so in the last few years with the billion-dollar lawsuit against Cox working its way through the courts.
I think RAM shortages would be the least of our problems…
Assuming China takes TSMC in one piece (unlikely without internal sabotage in the best case scenario), it would still probably take years before it produces another high end GPU or CPU.
We would probably be stuck with the existing inventory of equipment for a long time…
I am surprised we consider TSMC like a natural resource: isn't it really a combination of know-how and build-out according to that know-how? If smarts leave the country, perhaps this moves with them.
The risk with China taking over Taiwan is that they mostly expedite their own production research by a couple of years.
It kinda does resemble a natural resource though. The machines and technology in use at TSMC are so insanely complex, that there isn't a single person on earth who knows everything about how it works. TSMC functions only because of all of the pieces of the puzzle being together in the right place and arranged in just the right way. It's a very fragile balance that keeps it all running, and a major disruption could mean we get thrown back by a decade in chip-making technology.
What you say is absolutely true, and is a serious problem—but the way our system operates does not allow us to correct for it.
Anyone trying to spin up a competitor to TSMC would have to first overcome a significant financial hurdle: the capital investment to build all the industrial equipment needed for fabrication.
Then they'd have to convince institutions to choose them over TSMC when they're unproven, and likely objectively worse than TSMC, given that they would not have its decades of experience and process optimization.
This would be mitigated somewhat if our institutions had common-sense rules in place requiring multiple vendors for every part of their supply chain—note, not just "multiple bids, leading to picking a single vendor" but "multiple vendors actively supplying them at all times". But our system prioritizes efficiency over resiliency.
A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...). But it would require sustained investment at all levels—and not just investment in the simple financial sense; it requires people investing their time in education and research. Dedicating their lives to making the best chips in the world. And the only reason that would work is that it defies our system, and chooses to invest in plants that won't be finished for years, and then pay for chips that they know are inferior in quality, because they're our chips, and paying for them when they're lower quality is the only way to get them to be the best chips in the world.
> A wealthy nation-state with a sufficiently motivated voter base could certainly build up a meaningful competitor to TSMC over the course of, say, a decade or two (or three...).
> I am surprised we consider TSMC like a natural resource: isn't it really a combination of know-how and build-out according to that know-how?
Have you seen how many states and countries look enviously at Silicon Valley’s tech companies, China’s manufacturing dominance, or London’s financial sector and try to replicate them?
Turns out it’s way harder than you’d expect.
Hell, Intel can’t match TSMC despite decades of expertise, much greater fame, and regulators happy to change the law and hand out tens of billions in subsidies.
I have tried to provide after best ability, but have only been testing them on vm's on my mac! So be aware. I labeled them Beta due to this. But most features should work fine, probably better on linux than windows.
