[sbrocket]

Let's not speak in absolutes like that you (absolutely) "could not" do this. Most matters depend on the specific context of the situation.

The example you mention about a browser and JavaScript on web pages is a very different situation. A browser can be used to interpret and render any number of web pages and is not in any way tied to a specific web page.

This situation with Bambu is not at all the same. Bambu Studio and their networking plugin are very tightly coupled, to the point that they share in-memory data structures. There is no generic plugin architecture; it's a one-to-one interface where the AGPL side of the code explicitly names, downloads at runtime, and is versioned alongside that networking plugin. Most of Bambu Studio's major features beyond generating sliced gcode do not work without the plugin.

Yes, carving out a chunk that you wish to keep proprietary and then dynamically loading it into AGPL code to try and circumvent the AGPL license's explicit copyleft features is an AGPL violation. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins for one fairly clear explanation of this.

Or you can read the Software Freedom Conservancy's take on this exact controversy, now one day later, in which they are unequivocal that this is an AGPL violation: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...