Dear Elegoo & Support, The Centauri carbon uses a heavily modified version of Klipper, based on a commit 616 commits past v0.9.1 (shorthash 28f60f7e). Klipper uses the GPL-3.0 license. This license states that changes to the original source code must be disclosed/obtainable. This is enforceable by law. Would you so kindly make the modified sources publicly available? If not would you be able to send me a copy of the source code privately?

The bed MCU contains commands that are not present in mainline Klipper. Please provide the source for this as well.

Fully supporting this request. Everyone including elegoo is required to stick to licensing rules. They also want others to stick to it I guess. It's clearly Klipper under the hood so it has to be made available

Fully agree, taking opensource projects (Klipper) and calling them your own is super scummy (ahem Anycubic)

im in 100% suport of this

Mainline klipper can even connect to the bed board / hotend just shuts down due to version mismatch and it tells you exactly which version and commit they are using.

I fully support this request, which is essentially asking to adhere to use of open source software under a specific license.

Yeah, any derivatives of Klipper have to be open source because of the license. I mentioned this in one of the other chats I'm surprised it took this long for someone to bring it up. Not sure why they felt the need to lie about it running Klipper, though; I guess they just didn’t want to make it open source

Same. Provide the source as it is open source.

Oh its been mentioned a few times before.

I support this as well

I hope they make it open source as well

I went and emailed elegoo directly about this situation, along with the supporting details. I hope to hear back from them soon

❤️

I dont want elegoo to go down the wrong path

I support this. Provide the source.

Neither Chiri nor myself can provide this. We don’t work for Elegoo directly 🙁

Are any Elegoo employees in this discord? I appreciate the reply.

Owen would probably be the person to ask, but unsure if they are available in the weekends

There are some yes, I think Owen would be most suited for this request.

Ah I tagged him first but then removed it assuming he was just a helper lol.

Nah he’s a proper employee ^^ he’s likely not responding until Monday tho

Oof

This, plus the investigation happening regarding the shady Internet connections, makes for a pretty dirty mess elegoo got themselves in https://www.reddit.com/r/elegoo/s/C4XQSmkYmf

Can you give me a rundown of this issue? I was under the impression this was just the 204 health checks that run a little too often

Judging from the OP, that's exactly what it is

Which is really not that exciting (Like, yeah, it shouldn't happen, but not like it's leaking super critical data)

good lord

supporting this fully, open source means open source, doesnt matter

Guess I missed the newer updates, haven't checked in on the issues for a little bit. I can say that my CC without being blocked had uploaded over 70GB in the course of a month. To me, that seems a bit more than just a few too many health requests, but that's just me

It's definitely too much

I had my mainboard create 100GB of HTTP traffic in a month 😂

Mine was switched off for a week while I was on vacation, so that would also put me near 100 GB methinks

how do you measure the traffic out from the CC? and has orca been running when this happens?

I'm just using my unifi dashboard to get an overview, but I may actually set up proper syslog and do some traffic analysis that way

ok using tcpdump. orca is generating much traffic. but not much if only the printer is turned on. anyhow i have not set up a log properly as it was just a quick test

confirming on my end shortly

uhh

Over the span of 30 minutes of watching YT and playing BF4 my Cenaturi Carbon is responsible for 29.5% of traffic sitting idle.

Ok. After analyzing the traffic it is mostly health check as @Sims has mentioned. It is just A LOT of traffic for health checks.

Co-signed!

Dear Customer, Thank you for providing us with your valuable reply. We greatly appreciate your input, and we want to assure you that we are actively working on addressing the issue you raised. Currently, we have submitted the relevant information to our Research and Development (R&D) team and are awaiting their response. However, we regret to inform you that there has been a delay in the process, which has contributed to the extended timeframe. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this delay may have caused you. Please rest assured that your feedback is important to us, and we are fully committed to resolving the matter as promptly as possible. Our R&D team is diligently reviewing the information and exploring possible solutions to address the issue you encountered. Regards Jett Yue ELEGOO Support Team

Got the same response 1 to 1

Jeez

same

yeah, i got this exact same response too

Yikes as well

Id maybe ask Owen about this tomorrow

yeah I tagged him earlier in the thread

Okok good

reminder @User Not Found

@User Not Found

I stopped having the printer from idling anymore and now I’m gonna just turn off the wifi, the Chinese have too much to gain from my american network until they can explain themselves

@User Not Found Maybe you can answer these questions?

are you ok

no not at all

same here wanna talk about conspiracy theories

I mean, IMO the parsimonious explanation is "dev team duct taped together firmware-based on open sourced code too quickly to use best practices" than anything conspiratorial. However I do think having the printer running known out of date software that is open source and that we are at the mercy of elegoo to actually patch for security updates is a bad plan when they could, you know, just follow the terms of the license they are bound by so we can just do regular security patches. Seems like a great way to have someone unscrupulous find a vulnerability and build a botnet.

i mean, you can see the traffic it's putting out very easily if you run a competent network, it's a bit misbehaved (it pings connection check servers like, at least 10 times per minute, it's pretty bad) but doesn't appear to be malicious at all, there's no need to spread misinfo or conspiracies; if you're ultra paranoid just don't expose it to the internet -- it's bad enough they're violating Klipper's license as it is a legal and ethical issue without going into misinfo.

tbf, the firmware doing a bunch of network requests does nothing for this ticket. please open a new support case for that problem. We purely want the source code of everything that is licensed und GPL-3.0, GPL-2.0 and other copy-left licenses.

bruh

please move network traffic discussion here: https://discord.com/channels/969282195552346202/1404791617742831758 thank you

Why did they warn you?

^

cat walked over my keyboard and pressed enter a bunch of times :P

https://tenor.com/view/cat-cute-cat-cat-dance-cute-cat-dance-ai-cat-gif-15064057413633942575

@User Not Found are you part of this

(Do note: i am aware that open sourcing the centauri carbon code will be extremely challenging due to involvement with allwinner. Brands like creality have solved this in the past with code they didn't want to release by including binary blobs alongside their source code. Might be worth looking into)

There is also chitu involved obviously. If they got the firmware worked completely through chitu they would need to sue chitu to get the situation solved which is all pretty terrible. Anyways I hope they see the train of people here wanting to see them do the right thing

daily @User Not Found @User Not Found ping

hey you stole my jov

Agreed! Cute profile/pfp

Sent another email hoping for a different answer

https://discord.com/channels/969282195552346202/1403031356253929638/1403031356253929638 Reminder for elegoo staff @User Not Found @User Not Found ping

I got a different answer on the email i sent out yesterday

"we are not supposed to comply with legal requirements" ahh

Jeez

shouldn't have used klipper then

real

Or the Linux kernel, or Entware...

Turning into anycubic

Ironic, as the cc is based on the anycubic 2 pro's firmware

*legal expert

I am sorry for the waiting, there should be respond in a day or two🙏

Dear Customer, Thank you for your patient . Your information has been compiled and forwarded to the R&D department. The relevant details are still under discussion, and there is no new feedback at the moment. We have once again prioritized and expedited the handling of this issue. Thank you sincerely for your patience and understanding during this process. We will keep you updated as soon as we receive any progress from the R&D department. Please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions in the meantime! Regards Jett Yue ELEGOO Support Team

@User Not Found

Anycubic does the same thing with KobraOS (at least on the 2.x series, but I bet 3.x is the same). They violate gpl on a bunch of libraries including Klipper.

I got this: > Dear customer, > > Thanks for contacting us, this is Ronin from Elegoo support team. > Sorry for the inconvenience caused to you, we will do our best to resolve the issue for you. > > We have fed back the information you provided to the relevant departments. We will get back to you as soon as we have relevant results. Thank you for your patience. > > Should you require any further assistance or have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to our customer support team. > > Thanks and have a nice day. > > Regards, > Ronin Chan > ELEGOO Support Team

Maybe there finally listening to us?

I got this one as well

☠️ daily ping is wild

do see this, think we can stop the daily ping for a day or 2

Okie

oh I missed that lol

1 day down, 1 day to go 😅

https://tenor.com/view/majoras-mask-majora-zelda-final-day-gif-26658556

00:00:01 UTC ping 👀

We should get a response soon!! 👀

I got bad news for y'all 😛 It's weekend over there so you're unlikely to get any response until Monday

yikes

Everyone right now

https://tenor.com/view/well-waiting-were-waiting-gif-5848728

https://tenor.com/view/disappointed-mad-sad-gif-14324174

🧐

I love ur profile/name/everything else

thanks~

No problem

The printer is so awesome. With real Klipper software, it would be even better. Give us Klipper Open Source!

1 hour until it is officially monday in China

uh

that is like 2pm their time

they responded

Yeah

@User Not Found

Stop doing that

thats just wrong

You're missing the word here

thats a strange thing

It's not really, no

youd think email would be the exception

Staff here doesn't work on Sundays

weird

Simple as that.

ok

not really

Different Teams

'they' are a completely different department

that explains it

i don't expect the social media teams to be active on weekends, as support doesn't go through social media

thanks

Normally support doesn't answer on weekends either, only sporadically. We always tell everyone that responses can be expected during Chinese office hours on week days.

sheug

Never had a response from the on weekends

i dont know what to say

Neither do i

they responded today at 1:46am, dont exactly know what timezone they are in but that seems on the opposite of the globe

Maybe you got lucky

shrug

Hopefully we get an answer within the next 24h

https://tenor.com/view/the-time-has-come-michael-scott-the-office-pt-initial-angry-gif-12014939

@User Not Found Is there any update from your side? If there isn't, is there a new time estimate you can give?

bruh elegoo

💔

I can see people on the discord being annoying, but there is the fact that Elegoo has been digging in their heels and to speak frankly breaking the law with how they've been handling this.

I don't have control over Elegoo's actions overall, but I'd like to at least keep the Discord civil. Spamming gifs and pings is not conducive to that

i spoke in gifs

I sympathize with you but unfortunately the only real solution here is going to be pressing the staff to give a response. I feel like the amount of patience that people here have given staff far exceeds any expectation of civility - this didn't start with the ticket, they've been dismissing emails as well. It's not a minor bug or something that they've been ignoring.

Staff here isn't even the staff you're looking for to begin with though

I mean it's the last avenue that people have because they've been ignoring all the emails. And at the very @User Not Found was supposed to be giving a response about it and that's what people have been waiting for. If it's just another time estimate that's fine, or if the answer is " the discord and support emails aren't the right route for this" that's also fine but I'm not sure what we're expected to do in that case.

Support emails should be.

People have been sending those for weeks now and just getting brushed off.

I don't work for them either, so I can't exactly force them to act. Trust me, there's plenty of things that frustrate me as well, some for far longer than weeks.

I mean sure. But this is a pretty huge violation of trust for the community - like I hope you understand that as a volunteer moderator telling people to stop bothering them you've at least chosen to be somewhat complicit in them doing this

I'm not suggesting you stop bothering them. But this isn't the right place, nor is spamming the proper way to do it.

so what is the right way

And there's literally an employee in here that said that they would respond to people.

wht does the elegoo support staff even mean if it isnt the right staff we need

Also, I would just like to point out that daily spamming of messages also was the only thing that got a response from them in the first place so it does seem to be the best method honestly.

If you go to the initial question about it, I suggested to ping Owen, since he'd be most suited in my opinion. But he's not the guy who decides on any of this either. He's the guy you ask when your printer's power supply is on the fritz, or what kind of bolts you need for a vat replacement

I'm afraid that it's not even possible to have a complete open-source Klipper installation with the motherboard installed. But let's wait and see.

Isn't the hardware too stripped down to run full Klipper?

No. Kinda. It's complicated.

I know it's pedantic but it doesn't explicitly say he'll respond either

But it is running modified Klipper.

a very small Klipper ... g

That's incredibly pedantic and he should at least say that there's not going to be a response then.

Personally I expected this to be handled through the ticket system via support mails

I mean in the first message they even mentioned that if they can't do it publicly it's fine, they can be contacted privately. I'm not really sure why this shouldn't be a public support ticket.

also the fact is effects everyone

Yea that's what I meant. I didn't expect them to get brushed off.

Yeah the thread was only opened because people were getting brushed off.

It was the same with Neptune. The community made OpenNept4une possible. Will there soon be an OpenCentauri, too, thanks to the community?

there already is an opencentauri

i know

okay

At any rate hopefully they give us an update soon.

was doing some more research, stumbled across this, have some additional proof that the cc is running klipper

Bruh cmon elegoo

Rip no update

It's entirely possible most of the staff if not all of them had no idea that klipper was used. The board manufacturer may be preloading the firmware and doing the updates on behalf of elegoo. Regardless of that they should say something even if it's "It'll be a few more days while we sort this out"

they slready said that

I'm sure they know what Chitu is doing

Cmon elegoo

Can you elaborate? I'm out of the loop

Chitu seems to be the comany that made the firmware for the cc. There's a lot of references to them in the code

ahh, I see. thanks

https://discord.com/channels/969282195552346202/1370827161107431546/1407432285388673115 reposting this here; the snapmaker u1 will be open sourced (new toolchanger 3d printer); i hope elegoo will do the same

to follow the GDL

So what's the best course of action?

For what? Getting the source?

Yeah, because chitu made the code for elegoo or smth like that which is odd considering elegoo could of made it in house tbh

On that topic, @User Not Found Has there been any update from Elegoo's side? Or is this still being discussed internally? Cc @User Not Found

Sorry, I am waitting too🥹

hi owen

I would love for this to get open sourced so I can run klippain and dial in the print quality even more 🙏

Why would you ping another staff member after literally being told they’re still waiting for an answer?

Apologies for the delay. We have yet to hear back from our R&D team on this issue. We understand the importance of this matter and will get back to you as soon as we have an update

why wouldnt i

... because it's pretty much useless and it's gonna be the same answer anyways

sorry? i dont remember asking for a pessimist response

Not to add more to it but imo its dragging for 2 weeks..and I thought Copyright infringement/license/... was a serious thing...

Yes, but the support staff are not the people that need that weight.

In China it's a bit different

thats not support staff

Pretty sure everyone on this discord is part of the social media/support team

even the official elegoo account

I'm willing to bet that no one who called the shots on stealing klipper is here to answer for it

💔

what do you need R&D for that

see anna understands my need to ping people and annoy them

that's not what I did

nvm i hate anna

unless they're waiting for R&D to package it up so they can give it to us

Fair warning though: if you insist on annoying people after being told not to, there will be timeouts going forward.

okay!

Any updates on this matter? Been a couple days since we got an update @User Not Found

Stop putting pressure on Elegoo. If Klipper comes out open source at the CC, they'll announce it.

Like they did for the neptunes? I agree with not harassing support tho

Especially not the social media department lmao

Im not harassing anyone, just asking questions but ok

@User Not Found owen literally said this yesterday

2 days ago but ok

Not in particular, but just look at how many times elegoo staff has been pinged here. They are not the issue with this, they literally just are the messengers

Just want to say that I think everyone should chill out for like- a couple weeks maybe. I completely agree with everyone here but badgering daily is probably not going to be beneficial. And realistically you have another company collaborating on firmware (Chitu) and so you probably have some division between internal and external dev teams. You are going to have to have lawyers weighing in on this, both to deal with issues both companys may have (possibly opposing) interests in, and to evaluate the legal aspects of the GPL violation. None of that is particularly quick so maybe it would be best for people to just come back in a week, and certainly not bother people over the weekend.

Yeah we heard back from Owen and others and at this point it's " sorry but we're waiting until we can say more." Which is not ideal but that's where we're at. It's not radio silence or being ghosted at this point it's just... waiting for all the various parties to come to a decision.

His news isn't gonna change because we're pinging him, if he has something to say he'll post it

x (to keep the thread open)

Community pressure is exactly the way to make get a response, otherwise they will try to bury it under the rug.

exactly.

Just spam pinging staff twice a day isn't it lol

i think its time to ping them again, we havent done it for a while

4 days

there have been 12 pings in 18 days

@User Not Found have there been any updates from R&D or Chitu regarding this?

Yes but not by daily pinging the support staff

Then give me the email of the CEO. That is the support worker's job to handle requests, so is relaying customer dissatisfaction, including the severity.

true

I dont get why people getting all upset about the ping when the official staff themselves didnt say anything or wasnt even bothered about all the pings...but anyway imo if this was considered a serious issue it would have been already addressed by elegoo..

because people like feeling upset for other people

I simply blocked uploads from that IP. If I need to check for updates, I can turn that off for the time it takes to do so and then turn it back on.

>but anyway imo if this was considered a serious issue it would have been already addressed by elegoo.. Yeah, hm

lol the switch up when someone else said the same thing i said is crazy, i was being hated on earlier in the thread

I mean it was the day after staff said they were still waiting on a response from the relevant parties, wasn't really them ghosting or anything.

because if it is I'm just going to say that " official elegoo community shuts down discussion and requests for modified klipper source code" is probably going to have not great optics in the wider community

This person was told several times to stop bothering staff members. On top of that, they were already on thin ice from interactions earlier this week. Staff here let everyone know they’ll be updated as soon as there is news.

I mean we're waiting on a month now, have provided extensive proof, and we've functionally been ghosted through every avenue. The closest we've actually gotten to responses have been by spamming daily pings. Like this is a pretty significant issue I think when you consider that they did directly lie to all of us about a product that we bought and that they did steal from the community and failed to meet the bare minimum legal and ethical obligations associated with that.

the large question is if we're getting an answer at all. For all we know our request went straight into the trash (which would be a kinda big yikes)

The discord rule is being respectful and I feel like if you've been robbed politely knocking on the robber's door each day is pretty damn respectful.

@Sims I won't let the issue be buried, but pinging the marketing people isn't going to help things go any faster. If anything you'd be better off writing mails then.

i have, every week or so i ask for a followup

Multiple people have been sending emails.

But we don't magically have more information here either.

I mean if there are marketing staff here it would be very interesting to find out why they told reviewers that it wasn't running klipper

Probably just because they were told to do so. In the end the social media team is more or less just a messenger

Yea, marketing just communicates things they're provided

I mean even if someone could tell us what the guidance was on that that might be useful.

If anyone is interested in giving up on elegoo responding to us and you live in the US most of the states departments of justice would be interested in taking up the case as elegoo lied about it not being klipper and advertised it as such along with the license violations

ive reached out to the creator of klipper and got them informed about the current situation

> this isn't all the weird conspiracy theories about Elegoo spying on us that are somehow less of an issue than this thread The topic of this thread isn't the issue, if it was this thread would've been locked and/or deleted by now. The issue was with spamming staff pings which were getting more common (to the point of "daily" staff pings happening 4 times in a 24 hour period)

It was a new day for me. You can't lump Enya into Elegoo Official. Support staff maybe but no one has made it clear which tags ping which users. You're basically telling us to not use the only route of communication that has gotten real employee responses. I'm sure it would be much easier for everyone to just keep mindlessly emailing Elegoo and getting automated canned responses so no one has to deal with it. Like mentioned before, this isn't some small minor issue. Elegoo has stolen from the community and then lied about it.

so what's reasonable in your eyes as mods? once a week? once a month?

because again we have been pretty damn polite considering that the issue at hand is " elegoo lied to their community and stole from the community and seems to intentionally be breaking the law when it comes to providing code back to the community" which is a pretty big deal!!

its like saying "hey ik that we didnt ship out what we said we would, but that doesnt mean you should harass us for it"

this would also probably reflect badly on you too, admins and mods, that this isnt being a forced fix

What bothers me is that Klipper is open source, so the source code must be open even if the manufacturer of Klipper uses and modifies it.

thats why this whole thing started

i know

Historically Chinese companies haven't had much respect for open source licenses. Often not even in malice to begin with, Hanlon's razor stuff.

Launching it with their own version of klipper while providing the source code so users can choose to use mainline klipper via the community makes even more sense. Other manufacturers have done just that with success, so Elegoo can do the same.

its also something that doesnt take forever to do

I don't have an exact number for you, but you can't deny that the amount of spam was getting out of hand. Whether it's blatantly ignoring 2 "daily" pings and a staff reply (the very thing being demanded) only to send a third "daily" ping within 24 hours, spamming gifs, acknowledging one staff reply only to immediately ping another staff member (who, as expected, had no further answers either), or getting angry at being told that Elegoo staff does not check Discord in the weekend: this topic has gone far beyond polite. For what it's worth: I personally agree that Elegoo should follow the licences of software they used, but spamming pings is just not solving anything and explicitly against the server rules which I have to enforce. You're still free to continue this discussion and send out an occasional ping to Elegoo staff as a reminder, but please don't just blindly ping people without even checking if there was a ping or staff reply recently. Doing that just makes it look like the community doesn't actually care about the topic but is just using it as an excuse to spam.

Please remember that Discord admins and community helpers (mods) are not Elegoo staff. We do not have any more information than you do and we don't have access to the source code either.

This has genuinely been a civil response to being told that the company we purchased a product from not only lied to us about the product but also stole from the community to make it.

That's simply not true. Those 3/4 pings in 24 hours had a message from Owen in-between as well

If you look at the rest of the thread besides that one singular instance they have become gradually ramping either based on continued silence or because there was a promised response. Owen had said that he would have a response in a day or two. People were hoping for that response.

And sending him a ping as a reminder of that is fine, there's just no point in spamming pings to the point where the actual replies get missed

Sure but that only happened in a singular instance.

I don't know of any mutes happening as a result of this thread. I know that at least one person here got muted for reasons unrelated to this thread though.

Alright, then that was a miscommunication and that's fine. Are pings once every 24 to 48 hours reasonable? That's generally considered reasonable for checking for updates for something that's considered urgent.

In my personal opinion that should be okay as long as some context is kept in mind (like Elegoo staff on Discord not working in the weekends). However as Discord staff we have not decided on any exact numbers, so please don't quote it as a hard rule. While we do have some communication with Elegoo staff, that's mostly related to Discord and we have the same information as you when it comes to development (including both software and hardware). If I knew more, I'd be happy to tell you but sadly I don't.

Oh I meant more that you could communicate with staff so that they're not directly getting pinged by us and just check if there's an update. Indirect with less gifs and spam and such potentially.

I think that as long as the amount of pings is reasonable, there wouldn't be much difference between mods/admins pinging in private or the community pinging in public.

Thank you for understanding our side as well 🙂

Are you paid to admin this discord? Or volunteer?

I'm not sure how that's relevant to the discussion

this would also probably reflect badly on you too, admins and mods, that this isnt being a forced fix Please remember that Discord admins and community helpers (mods) are not Elegoo staff.

^ is only relevant if you are volunteering

Whether you consider us Elegoo employees or not, that doesn't change the fact that we cannot share more information or the source code because we simply don't have it.

@beiyr didn't say you had access to the source code. He stated it reflects poorly on Elegoo and related parties and you responded stating you aren't related.

welp, time for the weekly support mail

I did already send one yesterday, got the same reply

bruh

i got muted for pinging

I emailed elegoo and got a slightly different response than usual

I think that's the only way forwards we have. Might be interesting to find contact info for management on other staff that is not customer facing. Cause customer facing stuff clearly has no say in this and knows as much as we do

correct

these are just modified generated responses

did you type that or find that

I generated it with chatgpt

oh

Wonder who I know in the Android circles that live for this stuff...

@User Not Found @User Not Found so this is the answer?

https://github.com/Klipper3d/klipper/blob/master/COPYING Very cool elegoo

I don't see the deal with releasing the source code unless they are doing something fishy. They are selling a solid cheap printer, they are gonna get sales and sales will continue. I think this will feed nicely into the conspiracy of the massive amount of data being transmitted

This isn't a conspiracy though, we know exactly what is being pinged and what data is transmitted; just has a mistake that pings online connectivity servers way too often

What is being transmitted (sorry haven't been keeping up)

But would prefer to be able to fix that myself, obviously

https://discord.com/channels/969282195552346202/1404791617742831758/1408573851851296878

Ah

Some ICs have NDAs for their usage/documentation, oddly enough. So depending on who they have contracts with it could not be as simple as that. Given the rate of firmware updates I don't think they have any real developer bandwidth.

i agree that they have to follow the license Klipper use. but they probably need some time to publish it. there can be several reasons why its not done yet and many has been discussed here. It could be that they have done some "sloppy" programming from the start and want to clean up changes to their work. Maybe they want to wait to remove some more bugs etc. Other 3d printer companies had similar issues regarding license and this was released relatively late. I get that people want to develop for their CC. but if several people have reported this to elegoo via official routes at their e-mail and that "Klipper" probably has contacted them then we just have to wait. And at some point send a polite hint it it take to long as in months. Expecting companies to turnaround in a few days is not how companies function.

https://discord.com/channels/969282195552346202/1403031356253929638/1410539486655545456

a month can be "a few days". my point was that it can be several reasons to why its not going faster. so yes if this request has reach the correct people in the company they should at least give some form of public reply from their "publicity department". as a digression if i send a official request to the authority here they have to reply within 14days. The reply could say that they need 6months to deliver an answer. and this answer can be that they are solving it the following 6months. so even a simple public reply from elegoo that they have received the request and need time to solve this internal first would be a good start.

the problem is that they've now reverted, the initial reply was "we're waiting for r&d to give you an answer" which is what you're alluding to. now the answer has been changed to "this is closed source firmware, we are unable to provide any information" which is patently false, and a clear violation of Klipper's license.

This might get me muted, but I feel like the only way forwards we have now is to directly find the rnd team and contact them. Or do the same thing with chitu

Has anyone tried to involve the klipper team?

I think @beiyr tried reaching out

How would we get ahold of the r&d team directly?

I have no clue but contacting customer facing elegoo staff clearly is a dead end

Almost seems like elegoo doesn't even know how the cc is made

i am now reaching out to chitu directly @Sims

well, they don't need to release the IC SDKs, but the actual code they're using outside of those SDKs

The source code of klipper, unless some highly device specific driver is included, should be independent of the IC

Of course, it's all possible. But it's unlikely to be so cleanly separated

basicslly there is no resson for it to be closed source, there is nothing they cant hide if they need to

By the look of their work quality, thy would be even better off doing the Bethesda style "Let the community fix it"

judging from the code it already is somewhat separated

Klipper is just written in Python and uses some device driver to interface with the hardware. The device driver can be closed source, it's not related to Klipper (well, not entirely). The Hotend and Bed MCUs are STM32 chips, that are not closed down. The only questionable part is the Allwinner's DSP. Also, they shot themselves on the leg, we want a functional printer, but so far they couldn't even solve a fan-turning-on-by-itself error for over half a year now

also they dont even know their own code

You don't have to convince me of that hahaha

yet they act like its a bug

They don't have any code. The firmware is made by Chitu Contains a bunch of Anycubic stuff The bed meshing is made by Creality Chitu probably only made the main APP that drives the UI and orchestrates Klipper Which is also probably jus a mod of the Anycubic firmware

It's just that as a dev I hear "oh you'd just need to do this, simple" quite a lot. And it rarely is that simple. Just wanted to add some nuance.

THEY SUGGESTED ME TO SWITCH WIFIS TO FIX THE WEBUI PROBLEM

Well, pushing the source code to Github is easy 🤔 They should have do a proper investigation beforehand, now they are in a pit between GPLv3 and Allwinner's NDA

I mean, it's pretty simple, zip up that code and ship it /s

I also have this issue lol

its not an issue its a feature

by switching the wifi off

no

the solution to all problems 😄

As a dev as well, I agree that things are rarely, "its simple, do this". However, GPL compliance is simple; if you are using GPL code, you MUST make the changes to the code available to all who request it. If, for any reason, that is something you are unable to do, you MUST not use GPL code. Simple. You do not get to steal the GPL code and just choose to ignore the license. If they have an NDA with Allwinner, then they are in trouble because they have violated both contracts by integrating GPL code. GPL does not let you distribute hidden binary blobs that are part of the program; what Creality does with the K2 is a violation. Likewise, GPL does not let you "take time cleaning up your code" to get it into a release you are proud of; it mandates that any binary you release have the source code that makes that binary available. So if you are unhappy with the quality of code, do not distribute any form of it. Each released version of the firmware can independently have a source code request, and they are in violation to not comply. I think the next steps are to document the refusal and all information regarding the violation and contact the SFC with all relevant information and see if they will provide legal aid to klipper to enforce compliance against Elegoo.

Oh yeah if you comply from the start it's simple. If you're ignorant and find out afterwards, less so.

Those sort of blobs are like explicitly a grey area when it comes to GPL software and they're even used in Linux so I don't think most developers unless they're huge GPL evangelists are really going to have this as a sticking point. I'd much rather we get some source code and not have Elegoo sued into oblivion by Allwinner. And a lot of the original people requesting for the source code have also communicated that they're perfectly fine with binary blobs.

To be explicitly clear, these blobs are in the linux kernel because the linux kernel does not use GPLv3 but instead uses a custom GPLv2 with a special syscall callout as an exception. They are very much NOT a gray area, if you could just make your changes to the GPL code be a binary blob then there is no value to the GPL enforcement because everyone would just give their chainges as a binary blob. As a purchaser of this printer, I am explicitly requesting the entire modified source code as is my right under the GPL. A binary blob is neither sufficient nor compliant. > Why would they ever release the source code if they are guaranteed to get sued by Allwinner, but only maybe potentially might get sued by Klipper if they don't release it. The better question is, why would they ever use GPL code when they could not legally under their Allwinner contract? As of right now they have NO rights to distribute the firmware of their printers because they have failed to comply with the terms of the license for the code they used. I hope they comply, but compliance is not a nicety or a moral thing; it's a legal thing. Providing a binary blob is not compliance, and the GPL is a very explicitly written license that covers cases like this in plain legal language.

I mean they lied about it and they got caught. Right now they're caught between a rock and a hard place and they literally can't comply without getting sued, which not using binaries would result in. I personally am interested in the source from a hobbyist perspective who wants to be able to maintain my printer and would rather we get just the modified klipper code than nothing, and would rather this get handled without it escalating to the Klipper devs (if they're interested, and they very well might not be) having to file a lawsuit.

FYI, I added this issue as an article suggestion on Louis Rossmann's https://consumerrights.wiki/Article_suggestions

The lying about it actually makes this MUCH worse for them. Normally, GPL violations can only be handled by the copyright owners if they wish to proceed. However, when they lied about it, they committed fraud, which caused me to purchase the printer, which I would not have done if I had known they stole the code. If they do not comply with the GPL, I will be reaching out to the FTC and state regarding the intentional fraud. By lying, they gave everyone who purchases a printer in the US standing to sue on the grounds of fraud.

Oh I do agree with the fraud element of it for sure.

The Klipper project being able to sue them is probably a irrelevant concern... Being in china this more or less doesn't concern them legally

@( ) For normal software projects, you are correct. However, since they are selling hardware, they have to import it through customs and border control. U.S. federal courts can issue injunctions prohibiting the importing and ordering the destruction of their property when it reaches the border. Fluke, for example, has done this for Chinese companies that use similar-looking multimeters as theirs.

GPL has also pretty consistently been upheld internationally including in China.

Well I hope that it doesn't need to go that far, but its nice to have the option

I hope so as well.

😆

Considering that they did outright do deceptive practices it might be worth considering a chargeback depending on your bank. e: I am not advocating chargebacks for most end users because it's a pretty easy way to get blacklisted from future purchases and support if you were counting on any of that. But it might be worth it if you care strongly about the GPL violations.

true

"the company lied about the operating system on their product and the one they provided is a stolen one that they're using illegally" is probably something that someone at a bank would understand

i wish it would work if you could use just a raspberry pi to run the klipper

you can, i wrote a piece of software that allows you to set up such a connection (), but running some kind of mcu software on the mainboard is rather tricky

I vaguely remember during the original press coverage of the centauri carbon that some youtube videos and articles said that elegoo said that the cc does not run klipper

might be true that it's not compatible with fluidd since they are running it on a potato xD

i mean, true, lol, but it does run klipper

I still don't get it.. is the part of the community that wants open source so small that it makes no financial sense to have a non locked down firmware?

i don't get why they put time into locking it down (or a half shot effort at) anyway

thanks @Sims thats the thing I remember seeing before I purchased which made me think "ok they arent just stealing klipper like creality did"

lmao

If they did not pull this stuff it would be the best printer on the market considering the price to feature ratio

🙏

That's a funny way of saying "we're using Allwinners modified (read "in violation") version of TinaLinux, based on OpenWRT with Klipper shoehorned on top"

It makes me wonder about bambu lab

Isn't bbl based off Marlin?