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Comment by WJW | Hacker News Reader

Am I weird in not being too surprised? It don't have experience with wire EDM but every toolpath generator or slicer I've ever used was just local software.

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Bambu Labs ~recently had some drama around requiring an account / harvesting data for their machines. Might be what that's about.

IIRC this was about the machine firmware. Their slicer software is a fork of PrusaSlicer, which is OSS.

Bambu is great hardware but the software (and the firmware) is just terrible.

Truly. The slicer is able to generate bugs I've never seen before, in around 6 years of printing with several slicers and firmwares. Cura, Flashprint, Orca, Prusa, using Marlin, Sailfish, Klipper. None of them produced the weird stuff I find with Bambu's pipeline.

When the bugs don't creep up it's absolutely incredible, though.

The slicer even introduces bugs in things that were working perfectly in the software they ripped off.

For the A1 and P1S you're better off backporting the profile to PrusaSlicer or Orca.

And don't get me started on the network plug-in (the lack of transparency there makes me fairly suspicious that something is up) and the lack of directory structure support on the SD cards. Really, how could you mess it up.

> in the software they ripped off.

It’s a fork of PrusaSlicer, which was a fork of Slic3r. There’s a fork of BambuStudio called OrcaSlicer now.

They didn’t “rip off” an open source project, they forked it just as the parent project forked another project. This is how open source is supposed to work, isn’t it? Why are we shaming them for doing the thing we always encourage and then giving features back to the community which have gone into OrcaSlicer now?

You clearly don’t have any context into what Chinese companies have been doing when it comes to OSS. Being OSS doesn’t mean you can do what you want.

You must have not been aware of how that all happened. That's fine but please, spare me the lecture.

If you’ve got more information then just say it. Being snide and alluding to some information you’re not sharing isn’t helpful at all.

I’m not lecturing anyone. I was trying to leave a helpful comment for the thread to clarify that it’s a fork, just like the fork that it came from, and the other slicer that was forked from it.

They release their stuff, but only under (significant) community pressure, and they try to do it in such a way that interop becomes harder and harder. Some parts they never release, because 'reasons', but are suspected of containing large chunks of FOSS used outside of license. They release breaking updates that lock out other applications from interfacing with their hardware.

And then there is crap like this:

https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

Bambu is fantastic hardware but they're doing the exact same thing that DJI did in the drones field. A few more years and Prusa will have gone under, because it is impossible to compete with Chinese state subsidized companies whose sole purpose it is to dominate a market where they take something that has been community built and then embrace and extend it in every way possible to kick the door shut behind them. All of course in your best interests.

No, running locally is pretty standard.

Also what's weird is that this project seems to be primarily written in javascript. I can't imagine that's a pleasant user experience for generating tool paths...

it's a combination of JS, WASM, and WebGPU. the JIT engines are so much faster than you would imagine, especially if you tune your code right. workers allow for parallel processing on all of your CPU cores. WebGPU, at least in Chrome, is kind of amazing.

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