Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
jeffgeerling.com
jeffgeerling.com
For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type experience, but modern alternatives from others are nowhere near as hard as they used to be.
The closest "easy" alternative is probably Prusa, but you'll pay significantly more for a Prusa machine than you would a Bambu. They're an excellent company, and the complete opposite of Bambu when it comes to Openness. If money is no object, Prusa is highly recommended.
Beyond Prusa, there's a lot of other options. https://auroratechchannel.com/#section2 This list is a good one.
I personally run an old Elegoo Neptune 4 pro - but my needs are quite low. If I were buying today, a Snapmaker U1 or the Creality K2 Plus is probably where I'd end up going.
You're right that they're expensive but you get free human support 24x7, you get an open platform, lots of contributions to open source (even Bambu Studio is a fork of Prusa Slicer), and they pretty much go on forever.
My Core One+ started its life as an original MK3 and went through each iteration of upgrades, and it works like new. I'm now waiting for an INDX upgrade for it.
IMO the main drawback of consumer Prusa offerings is the lack of good chamber heating for more advanced materials. I can print PC on my Core One+ in the summer with the chamber at 45℃ (good enough for most uses, but 60 would be better), but in the winter it becomes a lot harder.
The Core One L is supposedly better in that regard but I've seen reports that it's still not ideal.
Other than that, I feel the extra cash pays itself back in the long run.
Could too much thermal insulation cause the bed temperature to lower (to avoid overheating chamber temp) to the point the print no longer adheres? etc.
If you could recommend some articles on the subject I would highly appreciate it.
The main issue is how close the walls are to the bed, which makes a lot of insulation projects dead in the water. If a radiator reflector foil [0] can be made to fit, it might help quite a bit as well.
Other than that, proper active chamber heating is really where we should be heading. When I have the time I might attempt to replace the left panel with one.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiator-Reflective-Thermal-Heating...
That would depend how much "safety" is built into the control system.
The simplest solution I've seen is taping up the edges of the enclosure where you find gaps, to prevent heat escaping.
If it's only PID-ing the bed, the ambient temperature shouldn't matter. Less work to do for the bed heater. On the nozzle, it's similar. A 40 C increase in ambient temperature isn't much compared to the 150 C+ that the control system is maintaining. Since the active parts of the printer must be capable of running at the target chamber temperature, there should be no risk unless you exceed it. The question is really, is the printer designed to operate continuously with a chamber of X C?
However... the risk would be that if it's too well insulated there isn't a good way for the system to cool quickly if it needs to, or if it somehow messes with what the control system is tuned for. On the older printers you could re-calibrate the PID loops to your specific hardware and environment. The newer 32-bit firmware seems to not require user tuning at all. Similarly with full enclosures, you might worry about the power supply or other electronics which aren't meant to be run at high ambient (maybe fine though).
You could also look at a separate solution like enclosing the printer in well-insulated chamber, and aiming to keep that outer space above ambient. That would be a good option if you're expecting a big thermal gradient to your workspace, like an unheated garage in winter.
But lots of questions really. Do you want to run at a high chamber temp? Are you running in a cold environment and having problems? Trying to save power? These are different scenarios.
If you steppers are already hot at 22 degrees of room temperature, they might end up damaged if air is at 45 degrees + are in use and generate their own heat.
I've insulated my Core One specifically to reduce noise, vibration, and improve high-temp printing and learned that:
1. When printing at high temperatures, you don't have to worry about overheating. Chamber fans are plenty capable of cooling the printer down.
2. There are so many nooks, crannies, thermal bridges, and gaps that modifying the printer to add insulation is a fool's errand. You will spend a lot of effort for little gain. If I were to buy another Core One, the only thing I would do again is damping pads in a couple areas to reduce resonance caused by the flat steel panels.
3. That being said, insulating the core one externally by covering it with a "jacket" of insulation or placing it in an enclosed(ish) space is very easy and effective. In an enclosed space, you need to make sure the chamber fans exhaust out, so they can retain control of the environment. You don't want it to be a fully closed system.
For point 3, these days I literally throw a beach towel on my Core One when printing high-temp filaments. It covers the top, front, and sides. This is enough insulation for 55C printing (the maximum allowed by hardware/firmware) and is easy to remove when I don't need it. Of course there are plenty of more suitable materials you could use, from textiles to foamboard insulation. But the concept is the same.
Full upgrade to the core one will be AUD$2k
I can keep my current printer alive for a long time. But it’s hard to justify the cost.
Prusa sell upgrade kits for each generation of printer.
If you were to do it all in one go it would require replacing the same components multiple times and would be insanely expensive and time consuming but if you upgrade as the product evolves its not a big deal (I recently upgraded my Mk4 to a Mk4s and I'll probably jump to the Core One in the coming year if I have some free time).
Then in 2025 they changed their 'open community license' to say users may not:
“Sell complete machines or remixes based on these files, unless you have a separate agreement…” and “The Restriction: You cannot commercially exploit the design files…”
https://blog.prusa3d.com/core-one-cad-files-release-under-th...
Maybe this is more a comment on how open source has had to change in the face of commercial exploitation of the vulnerabilities traditional open source licenses create for the businesses doing the R&D.
If I make an open source car, I don’t want someone else taking my design work, and then selling a cheaper version of my product, I want my consumers to build their own parts.
Different licenses are build around different philosophies, and the common open source definitions allow commercialization as long as the source & modifications you make are freely available to others. Prusa is breaking from that tradition.
Maybe you should make a source-available car, or a car with select portions of CAD available, or something else that fits your intended business model better than open-source.
You can be entirely in favor of the open source ethos, even as a commercial entity, but then certain actors can take advantage of that ethos and just directly commercialize your R&D investment and take all the proceeds of your investment, whether or not they comply with attribution or share-alike requirements.
It’s tough seeing an open source project you’ve poured tons of care and effort into (and WANT people to share and remix and build cool things) get more or less “extracted” for profit without contributing back (code or money).
At the end of the day, none of it really matters unless you’ve got money and time to actually try to enforce your licenses, or have enough customer mindshare to effectively change the behavior of bad actors without needing legal action.
I’ll probably use licenses like Prusas in the future for similar reasons, even though I generally prefer to use less restrictive ones. Bad actors, or even just non-benevolent actors, can really sour the open source ethos, and it sucks but there’s no way to legally enforce “don’t be a jerk” without restricting a legal document in slightly unpalatable ways.
It only stops the honest people from doing that (and possibly much more, like manufacturing and selling replacement parts or mods).
Creating 3D models from existing products is relatively fast and easy. The hard parts have always been the actual design process, materials selection, and setting up the supply and manufacturing chain.
Prusa took what was practically a non-issue (cloning of their modern printers which have multiple custom parts and are overall not easy to clone cheaply anyway) and used it to restrict the freedoms of end users and small businesses while crying about how they are the victims.
I lost a lot of respect for Prusa when they came out with the OCL.
A damn patent would have been both more effective and less restrictive for reasonable commercial purposes.
They ARE however deterrents to bad actions from less-than-scrupulous entities, and enforcement mechanisms against fully-unscrupulous entities.
I suspect (but will admit I am just guessing here) that Prusa would prefer not to get to the enforcement stage because it is both costly and annoying, but having that in your back pocket is, sadly, necessary in a litigious society with some number of unscrupulous actors, and the deterrent effect alone is likely enough to achieve most of their goals.
Even if the unscrupulous entities cared about the license, they would just get their (already paid for) CAD person to reverse engineer every single necessary model over the course of a week. If an amateur like me can reliably do that in his spare time, imagine what a professional could do during an 8 hour shift.
But it doesn't matter either way because no unscrupulous entity is going to be dumb enough to publicly announce that they used the models to produce their clone.
If I manufacture a clone of a Prusa, there is no way for anyone to prove that I used the original 3D models. If it were possible to prove that, it would also be possible to "prove" that I copied 3D CAD models that I've never seen, which could put me in legal trouble. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and reverse engineering (and all the costs associated with manufacturing and prototyping[0]) likely _can_ reproduce a near identical Prusa printer.
As an aside, if you've seen the average Prusa clone, it's often quite far from the original design. Almost nobody 1:1 cloned Prusas back when that was a thing, because the Prusa design didn't cut corners. Those clones would often use designs which were probably derived from the original, and were unpublished. Why didn't Prusa go after them for this? He should have had just as much luck given that those manufacturers were potentially in breach of the GPL.
In summary, the OCL cannot actually stop clones, because if it did, we'd have some serious problems with our legal systems, prohibiting perfectly legal reverse engineering (irrespective of if the cloners did the reverse engineering or not).
It _only_ stops people who are honest enough to state that their designs are derived from Prusa's models. People who weren't a threat to begin with, and who now are voluntarily subscribing to legal issues if they ever felt like selling a Prusa modification without Prusa's approval.
The real deterrents are:
* Design complexity
* Extreme amounts of competition (almost nobody would buy a prusa clone these days unless they _wanted_ to have an almost broken printer to force them to learn how to make it work reliably). We have cheap, good, first party 3D printer designs.
[0]: To clarify, when I say prototyping, this needs to happen irrespective of if you reverse engineer or not. Once you have the models, which will be true to life, you still have to "reverse engineer" the tools/dies/materials/etc, for which Prusa sensibly does _not_ offer the models.
The market leader gets cloned but somehow the market leader is still standing.
That market leader was previously Prusa. Prusa rested on their laurel and got outflanked.
This is like complaining about Valve letting game developers generate free Steam keys (=Valve doesn't get fees) that can be sold on other storefronts with the caveat that the developer must sell the keys for at least the same price he set on steam. Being allowed to sell those keys is a sign of goodwill, but the goodwill is conditional upon the source of goodwill not destroying itself. If you buy a game on the Humble Store, Valve won't get a single cent, most of the money goes to the developer, and yet Valve still has all of the ongoing infrastructure costs.
They're doing what it takes to be a business. I was glad when they moved to more injection molded parts instead of trying to 3D print their own parts. It was a cool idea at the start but the time for that was long past.
My only slight objection is that you can tell they're trying to have it both ways: They want all of the good will and reputation of being open source, but they're also trying hard to put as many limits on this as they can. Like all projects trying to walk the line between open and closed source, I think they're at their best when they're honest about what they're doing. The moves they made with their open license are completely reasonable and I support them, but that blog post was a bit of a letdown when they tried to make it about fighting patent trolls for the community or something. When you reach Prusa scale you have to be honest that you're no longer one and the same with the community. You are the medium-ish size business that people rely on. Taking away the right for others to sell the products is a reasonable business move, but please be honest about it rather than trying to tell us it's for our own good.
It's tough to build a business around a product that takes a lot of capital to build, and you offer for free to your competitors...
Unfortunately, it seems like the fully open source business model doesn't work well when you can be undercut by extremely cheap labor from another country and a company that doesn't share or reciprocate your values.
It sucks. Also, fuck Bambu.
But yes, fuck bambu.
Think of china less as a country and more as one huge Chaebol.
There exist a lot of other buying criteria than price.
They don't out-innovate anyone, they copy and use infinite slave labour to flood the market with cheap inferior products. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous.
It's always a headscratcher when you try to eeke out a living and are told that you have to work for a company writing proprietary software to have the right to work on an open source project. Wouldn't it be better if you made your living off the open source project? Apparently not. If the project was proprietary from the start, there would be no complaints.
This hardliner stance basically means there is no continuum between proprietary software and open source software. That lack of continuum will mean that the vast majority of software will always be 100% proprietary.
I have no first-hand idea of they’re ’morally’ better than Bambu - I haven’t looked into it - but I think the folks in charge of buying them considered that.
Having experienced both Prusa's prices (not just the machines, but also parts like nozzles and thermistors -- there's no way Prusa's thermistors should be twice as expensive as Bambu's) and Bambu's shenanigans, if I ever need a new printer, I'm very inclined to start my search with those smaller brands too.
Then I installed the app (open source in github) and started using the “cloud” services. I consider myself pretty stupid with such things, and it was absolutely the easiest thing I’ve done in 10 years.
The price is very high though. But at least you OWN the damn thing.
- they benefit from open source software work
- we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines
As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3.
My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us into the equivalent of being a Chinese citizen who can't afford the Temu product they make at work. Their machines are priced more or less only for US export, and not really something most people here can reasonably buy. They even refuse to use injection moulding out of some self righteous principle, which drives the price per unit up further all the while selling less durable machines cause they're half RepRap. I take it sort of as a personal insult and I will never buy one even though I can afford it, I see it as bad value. Like buying a gold plated watch or something.
Are they actually still the best on price/performance? There are now dozens of Bambu clones at lower prices, I'm wondering how much worse those are (for example, a printer like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2)?
Indeed, but if you add the AMS options to both, the P1S suddenly becomes a lot more expensive.
> The base A1 goes for like 270€
The A1 is in a different weight class, not being enclosed.
This is how you end up with overpriced "3D print cartridges", unfixable printers that fail at warranty + 1 day and control software that goes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."
From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.
That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.
I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.
I don't really buy the longevity angle for something that's moving so fast in terms of tech, my old Ender 3 lasted long enough to make itself obsolete in practically all aspects with practically zero maintenance. I had to junk a perfectly working machine because it became something not worth putting filament into. With such improvements each gen I'd rather have a cheaper machine that runs for a few years. Maybe we've already peaked but I seriously doubt it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see non planar antialiasing as stock at twice the speed and half the loudness, making what we use today once again become a waste of filament. Disposable low cost crap makes a whole lot more sense imo.
Remember the first gen Makerbots? Horrid overbuilt machines with glass beds, mandatory raft, quality barely worth a mention. They cost 5k and were obsolete in like two years tops. That's roughly how I see Pruša's approach as well.
If we actually valued local skills in the EU we'd have subsidies that make them competitive, ergo we do not. Personally I don't really see any for-profit surviving past going into the dark pattern hole eventually, there's too many incentives. Best just take what's best and least locked down today and run with it, assume it will vanish tomorrow. Forget long term support. Luckily there's always someone else willing to burn VC money in the initial market flood phase lmao.
The first year was rough, from what I've read. Mine arrived March 2025, it has taken no work to print excellently, and at about 700 hours I have lubricated it every 200 hours, and I just tightened the belts about 50 hours ago. That's it. If it's less than $100 a roll I've probably printed it. I have no complaints.
From what I've gathered across Discord servers (QIDI official, QIDI unifficial and Team 7 mostly), there is a decent percentage of machines that more or less just work, as has been your experience. For the less lucky ones, it's a lifetime of tinkering. I'm on the latter cohort, unfortunately.
Not to mention that out of the box you need to lock the printer in a cabinet as its printing. It used to give me headaches to be close to it for more than a couple minutes.
not saying it can't be better eg. faster, multi-color/material but yeah works for me right now with Cura
Ender 3 V2 that I paid <$250 for about 5 years ago. It paid for itself on the first print job where I repaired some Samsung stove knobs where replacements were $400 a set.
I'm now considering an upgrade and I'll likely just go with the Ender 3 V3 Plus (bigger bed, auto leveling, still an offline printer) and < $450 for cost.
It's been a fantastic printer for me.
I use Cura, stick with standard settings, use Sun PLA+ for all my prints, and the only thing I really need to do is level the bed sometimes.
But that's part of the hobby, surely? Like, just having a printer and having it print things first time, and never taking it apart or replacing chunks of it to see if that would work better, seems kinda dull to me ;)
Oh, and fuck Bambu. Never touching their shit.
I'm bad though, I have the nozzle run into the bed as there is noticeable sag/difference at the middle of the bed, but it's good enough for me there is some elephants foot going on but not crazy
It's like bikes - someone rebuilds theirs in their garage, I take mine to the dealership for the service. For me, mine just works. I don't have endless hours for tinkering with everything I'm using.
They subsidise the living heck out of designated national champions, dump oceans of cheap product onto the international market, kill off international competitors, and then seize control of markets. It is neither legal, nor morally defensible.
Want a printer that happens to not be made in China? Good luck. Pay more, or knuckle under, and accept Chinese control of your technology, and increasingly, what you are allowed to say and think.
Actually try building something somewhere else - here's the process Smarter Every Day went through for a VERY simple item, nowhere the scope or complexity of the 3d printer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connections on a second board that goes on top of it. Most minor fixes are like this. Another time, I had to remove a stuck piece of filament, which involved taking apart the whole front of the toolhead and dealing with even smaller and more fragile flex PCBs.
[0] https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/h2/maintenance/replace-cooling-...
You're not the target market for Bambu customers.
This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.
Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.
3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.
We wouldn't really care either, but alas, there is no 3D printer dealership service center (unless you count 1 month round trip to ship it back).
I'd argue that my workplace who bought the H2D is exactly Bambu's target market. Most of us have personal printers we tinker with, but for work projects we need something that is mostly hit print and wait. We aren't really running a print farm, but we do a lot of iterations and make prototypes constantly. This is what the H2D was purchased for (specifically, the heated enclosure to better print ASA parts). Being hard to repair isn't really a problem, it's that it broke at all. And after it does break, changing a fan or clearing a jam should not be overhaul grade maintenance.
We also have a couple of P1Ss that are very solid, the one H2D has all the problems.
im not using a melted bead printer if care in any way about the quality of the result. resin printers are readily availble
the bmw owner is buying a better machine, or just paying somebody to do the printing for them
This was after around 700 hours, which isn’t terrible, but working with their support is exhausting. I don’t think I’m going to touch it again until winter, unfortunately.
I did once got it into iron sand which seized the motors. Luckily their insurance covered full replacement.
There are much worse things about them like subpar performance or shitty way to access the card slot in Avata, but otherwise they solid.
Also, Prusa copy from Bambu too. Like their own material switcher (much less sophisticated than the AMS) and the new Core printer is really more a Bambu copy than the other way around, honestly. In fact other brands are copying Bambu too.
I really like them, they are fair to me as a consumer. Spare parts are cheap, there's no consumable restrictions or subscriptions for their cloud service.
And they're really as plug and play as you can get right now. I don't really need that, I've owned printers since the first generation so I know how to deal with issues. But really they happen rarely. The worst I get is stuck filament in the AMS and I found I can prevent that by removing the bit of filament with gear bite marks after it's been through. It absorbs more water then and gets brittle.
Also I've learned from earlier printers not to mix materials in the same nozzle so I switch them too.
The core XY design that all manufacturers are now centering around has been around long before Bambu existed as a company.
That aside, sure, maybe Bambu were the first to make an affordable core XY machine. But, outside of China, we still don't have an affordable core XY machine by this definition.
So Bambu were the first Chinese company to take advantage of cheap Chinese manufacturing to stop making crappy Prusa i3 clones, crappy other things, or v slot Bowden crap (Ender 3, etc.).
They were the first to "clone"[0] some existing core XY designs and make a polished and affordable product.
Cool.
I am not saying its a bad thing, but do we need to applaud it when China repeatedly undercuts the rest of the world by not playing on the same playing field?
[0]: I say clone only because many of the "clones" Prusa complained about so much were only visually similar to the uninitiated and were otherwise quite distinct (and also much lower quality). The Bambu core XY designs look a lot like other more expensive core XY designs of the time. But really core XY isn't hard, the hard part is all the fine details, which every "clone" maker has to deal with inevitably.
* one day remote printing no longer works, you need to set it up again or even get into prolonged debugging session
* remote printing works one ane device but not other
* one color toner cartridge on a color laser printer is empty or near empty, printer refuses to print without all manners of overrides on the local control panel, making it unusable for non-technical users
Well, the last point is basically sabotage by the manufacturer to make you buy more stuff, as it can print B/W perfectly fine or with slighly less quality until that one cartridge is replaced. But I guess that kinda proves my original point. :)
And it's impressive how long those ink tanks last: I printed out 400 pages of full color and the ink tanks went from 80% full to about 50% full. (There's a clear plastic window in front of the ink tanks, with a "refill when ink reaches this level" line on it — a raised line of plastic, not something inked or painted onto it that could rub off — so you can glance at the printer and see what level the ink is at). The ink bottles cost me about $12 each if I remember right, and each one will fill the ink tank from the "refill here" line to more than 100%: I had to stop filling, then wait until I had printed a few hundred more pages, then refill the rest. Rough back-of-the-envelope math says maybe 1200 pages from a full ink tank. The C, M, and Y bottles will cost $36 total (the K bottle will last a lot longer so I'm not counting it in this math), which means 3 cents a page for full-color, ink covering nearly the whole page, prints. Considering the cheapest print shop I've found would charge me 20 cents per page (and I've seen 50-cents-a-page quotes for full-color printing), the $200 printer will have already paid for itself by the time you run through one ink tank (17 cents saved times 1200 pages is $204).
This is turning into an ad for Canon, but seriously, it's a great printer. The only thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't do automatic duplex printing (I have to pull the pages out, flip them over, and put them back in), and I knew that when I bought it (the model that did automatic duplex was $450, and I chose not to buy that one). Oh, and I am not affiliated with Canon in any way: considering how glowing a review this is, I should probably say that explicitly.
But the best part for me was that it's not an Epson. I previously owned an Epson ink tank printer, and it was great... until the ink sponge filled up. Did you know that ink jet printers, at least the ink-tank variety, have a sponge inside them? When you do a "clean clogged print heads" routine, the printer moves the print head over to the position of the sponge, and pushes ink through the print heads until it's moved enough liquid to hopefully push the clog out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But the sponge can only absorb so much ink before it fills up. And on an Epson, the sponge is not a user-serviceable part. They want you to send it to one of their official repair shops to get it replaced, costing I don't know how much because I refused to do it. I found an unofficial way to wipe the printer's internal counter that kept track of how much ink was in the sponge... and when the printer died about a year later (for unrelated reasons), I went shopping for another brand. I'll never buy an Epson printer again. Canon, on the other hand, will sell you a "maintenance cartridge" (a large sponge mounted in a plastic tray of the right shape to slot into the printer) for about $10 plus shipping. When the sponge gets full you can just swap in a new one. Dead simple.
Enough gushing from me. The point that I spent way too long getting to is, ink-jet printers don't have to use cartridges. Ink-tank printers used to only be available in the Asia/Pacific market, but they're available in the US now. A couple years ago I helped my parents (in the US) buy a Canon G3020 and set it up for them. So far their experience has been positive, too.
If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.
But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.
I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.
Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.
I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.
I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.
Prusa is, of course, the gold standard, and their more recent printers are super easy to use, too.
But FWIW I'll be transiting China in few months time so will be interesting to see what they sell there.
not really -- but there ARE total open printers out there. voron and ratrig come to mind.
prusa decided to change a lot of ethics once they became 'big'.[0]
[0]: https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-prin...
are they making their own actuators that communicate with some encryption?
if i buy a bamboo and i dont like it, can i not just cut out all the electroincs and put whatever the new dev board of the day is and flash standard 3d printing firmware on it and send it through a calibration run?
And in any case, Bambu’s well-publicized abuse of open source has driven me off of ever using their printers. I know that only nerds care about this, so I hope Prusa keeps pushing to build a straightforwardly better product.
> We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users.
So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING! This is so crazy of an excuse that I don't believe it.
Yeah, this is a farce.
LAN mode is also abandonware with numerous issues and missing features that they've had no interest in fixing. Orca slicer has had to rely on hacky workarounds in Bambu's buggy networking plugin just to be able to connect to printers in a different subnet. https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
I can connect to my P2S in LAN mode with OrcaSlicer just fine (currently using the latest 2.4.0 nightly).
> be able to connect to printers in a different subnet
This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
You either haven't updated the firmware or you also enabled "Developer mode" which has its own issues.
> This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.
It's not a separate issue, it's a long-standing bug in their proprietary networking plugin that they refuse to fix. Orca slicer has implemented a hacky workaround so it actually works there.
Yes, that's the point. The nerworking is broken. The issue isn't unique to a specific slicer, their software sucks. Orca ran into the issue because they wanted to make a basic feature that works on every other printer on the market work on a bambu.
There, I fixed it for you Bambu. You may use it under Creative Commons.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t shame those companies for not abiding to their words, but there is more to it than outrage. Suing them (or the threat of) might also work here if they really went against the license.
My biggest annoyance is that I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely. I am still very annoyed at Bambu Labs for this stupid move, as it directly impacts my usage.
What most people seem to be missing in these discussions is that some of us have printers in remote workshops, not next to us. So all the "LAN" or "Developer" options aren't great, especially if you have to pick between those OR the cloud.
> I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely.
The remote interaction with the printer goes via their cloud.
> If you tell me my new toaster can send a live video of my bagel to my phone then I am entitled to receive that functionality without being subject to your shitware.
No you aren't. You might be able to use 3rd party clients, but this is never a given. BambuLab owns their cloud servers, they can choose which clients they will allow to use them.
A SaaS company enjoys full control of their cloud servers and licenses use of their proprietary webapp to you. A hardware company sell a physical product that you own and is not morally allowed to yank functionality later. As far as I'm concerned their cloud servers are part of their product and that's a hill I'm willing to die on. Anything short of that is a blatant bait and switch.
I'd be willing to settle for them offering fully refunded returns to all affected customers who want it. Failing that I'd expect the court system to award appropriate damages. This sort of scenario is literally what consumer protection laws were created for.
Edit: I (and many others) might be operating under a misunderstanding? It looks like all (?) the advertised functionality might be available (at least for now) locally via MQTT. But I'm not entirely clear on that. https://github.com/Doridian/OpenBambuAPI/blob/main/mqtt.md
I don't think this was ever the case. But I'm happy to be proven wrong here.
The company would prefer that you "put pressure" by getting angry, ranting on social media, and then still buying their product.
That’s not impersonation. That’s Bambu discovering that user agents are not authentication.
This is just Bambu alienating their customer base, again.
The funny part here is it seems Bambu is more exposed to a libel suit than the developer is for... checks notes clicking 'Fork' on Bambu's github. Since the moment he did that, his software was supposedly in breach of Bambu's...expectations.
The legal risk comes from why you are doing it and what protections you are bypassing.
If you are doing it specifically to bypass Bambu's authorized access, then it is very likely to fall afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The mechanism (spoofing the UA) is entirely incidental to the motivation (bypass authorized access), which is what the law cares about.
At least in the US, the law against unauthorized access to a computer system has no requirements for how good the security has to be. If you should reasonably know you're not supposed to be using it, that's potentially enough to make it illegal.
Am currently somewhat into the topic of UAs for a personal project (not connected to Bambu printers), so am honestly interested for any tangible information, I just dislike us assuming something illegal because a corporate entity views it in a negative light.
[0] https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/131816p.pdf ("We also note that in order to be guilty of accessing “without authorization, or in excess of authorization” under New Jersey law, the Government needed to prove that Auernheimer or Spitler circumvented a code- or password-based barrier to access. See State v. Riley, 988 A.2d 1252, 1267 (N.J. Super. Ct. Law Div. 2009). Although we need not resolve whether Auernheimer’s conduct involved such a breach, no evidence was advanced at trial that the account slurper ever breached any password gate or other code-based barrier. The account slurper simply accessed the publicly facing portion of the login screen and scraped information that AT&T unintentionally published.")
But, though there are some explicit laws where that’s how it works, that’s not generally how the legal system works. If I have a private server, and I don’t give you permission to access it - or, even better, tell you not to, it doesn’t really matter how I secure it. If you access it, you’re in the wrong.
To give a physical analogy, it doesn’t matter how I’ve secured my house. Even if the door is open, you’re not allowed to just waltz in (or, to take it a bit further, come in and start using my stuff).
With authentication it's "gates up" and then "without authorization" from CFAA kicks in. I think it's unlikely that a user agent string creates a "gates up" situation, especially not if it's from code granted under a permissive license.
Bambu clearly didn’t want to press charges on their users, though, so they weaponized the law to try and prevent this, and it’s causing them issues.
In any case, we’re not in some “only the laws matter” reality, we’re also have ethics and morals to consider, in which case Bambu is clearly in the wrong. If they want to secure their servers, they should do it properly rather than using legal threats.
A US Attorney prosecuting anyone on behalf of Chinese business interests isn't a good look politically, though, and that's often a factor.
If I made any changes prior to building, would it still be acceptable? And if not, where is the line? What is the legal basis, any precedent? How much of the code may I modify before I cross an invisible threshold and somehow "bypass" an "authentication" (neither fit UA anyways, either for law or other purposes unless one can provide any evidence that it ever has).
My neighbor could in theory buy the key to my mailbox, but it would be illegal for him to actually open my mailbox and read my mail.
1. You bought the house. 2. They gave you a key, which implies that you have permission to use it. 3. Is the problem really the _copy_ of the key?
They could very well enforce login for the entire app, that doesn’t require any closed source code and everyone would be worse off.
(Later, a trick was found to replace the signature and still boot, but it required extra chips in the game cartridge)
- "It is more convenient" is not a strong enough argument there, that's kind of the point of a commercial venture.
- Yes, they could be nicer about it. They aren't. That doesn't make this any more legal or acceptable.
Given this was "a developer using upstream code verbatim", in your analogy "ricardobeat" would've been printed on the blank postcard by you, then you gave me the postcard with permission to use/modify/redistribute it. Plus it'd be a machine-readable field interpreted as "this postcard supports the same envelopes as ricardobeat's template", not something read by a third-party.
You're correct of course that this is an entirely distinct argument from what Bambu's legally allowed to do under existing law.
I don't know if that is what is happening here because the article is talking about a fork that is bypassing Bambu's servers entirely (which is permitted under the AGPL) and Bambu is not happy.
Edit: On re-reading, it seems to me the fork is still calling Bambu's servers. It's just bypassing some things.
Elsewhere, the GNU explains why this is important[1]:
> With proprietary software, the program controls the users, and some other entity (the developer or “owner”) controls the program. So the proprietary program gives its developer power over its users. That is unjust in itself; moreover, it tempts the developer to mistreat the users in other ways.
> [...]
> Freedom means having control over your own life. If you use a program to carry out activities in your life, your freedom depends on your having control over the program. You deserve to have control over the programs you use, and all the more so when you use them for something important in your life.
Telling your users they can't run modified versions of your open source client goes against this principle.
Again, I'm not necessarily saying Bambu isn't within their legal rights to do this, I'm just saying it's a jerk move.
[1]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-impor...
While the right of access is not granted by AGPL - it is not reasonable to run a public service with an AGPL client and say you shouldn't be connecting to it.
They are doing a lot of work to create implied consent under CFAA.
If you want to control access you must do something to control access - it must reach a threshold, it cannot just be a public user agent string.
Unfortunately, the CFAA doesn't necessarily require that authorization is implemented through technical means, and it definitely doesn't require any authorization to be technically robust.
This is a direct quote from the Affero GPL:
> When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.
The thing Bambu is doing is very much against the spirit of the AGPL, which is the license they chose for the Bambu printer software. And the AGPL has such broadly written language it's hard to believe what they are doing complies with the letter.
For example, AGPL doesn't prevent you from being banned from a Mastodon server.
The key part of the sentence you quoted is "... to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work" -- meaning, you can't use anti-circumvention to prevent people from using or modifying the copyrighted code.
Blaming the CLIENT for this is absolutely crazy.
Still I suspect it is about spying in wartime, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the main reason even Ukraine is winning since januari 2026.
First China prevented Ukraine from using any of the drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercising the built in kill switches in Chinese drones used in by Ukrainians.
Suddenly Bambu, another Chinese company started listening in on the 3D printing on a massive scale in secret factories all over Ukraine that make the drones to replace the Chinese drones. Very suspicious.
Whatever is the reason Bambu locks down software or firmware on their 3D printers, now is the time for programmers to change the situation. We need to put up money like Louis Rossmann did [1], not to fight legal battles but for a assembly language programmer to reverse engineer the Bambu firmware and make a free and open source version.
This firmware replacement will cost a couple of months to write so we all should send that programmer a little money so he/she can release it for free.
A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLLVn6XT7v0
P.S. I would be willing to do the reverse engineering but I would need at least 35 euro per day (to eat) to build a new firmware for all Bambu models from scratch. I would need a few different models of printers on loan for a few weeks to test the new firmware. I estimate it would take 5-9 months to rebuild firmware for all models from zero and release it. Maybe Rossmann and Geerling could use their influence and coördinate this freeing of the firmware?
I just emailed Rosmann and Geering to see if we together can free the Bambu firmware. Anyone who wants to help, please contact me trough my HN profile.
the Ukraine war started in 2014 technically. But even if we go to the "current" wave start, that was 24 February 2022[0].
Bambu Labs released their first printer (X1C, on kickstarter) on 31 May 2022, let alone their "must go through cloud service" restriction starting in early 2025[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Ukrainian_war
[1]: https://blog.bambulab.com/firmware-update-introducing-new-au...
https://www.newsweek.com/china-ukraine-russia-war-drone-uav-...
2) It was mentioned in an interview of military in this Dutch documentary https://npo.nl/start/serie/konvooi/afleveringen/seizoen-1
3) Several journalists mentioned it in their news reporting (sorry, I can't locate the links right now).
4) Two soldiers vlogged about it on youtube.
Documentairy in Dutch but the interview is in English
the kill switch is discussed in part 2 https://youtu.be/za62IvbfzXE?t=1061 by the fire department who got the drone donated by the interviewer from "Protrct Ukraine"
Makes fleet management a bit harder but I don’t believe that requires internet access unless I missed some update.
I'm not up to date with their latest printers, but the Bambu printers used during this timeframe have easy ways to enable LAN only mode. You can leave it disconnected from the network entirely and use an SD card, too.
The app lets you enable root access and install firmware mods. There are multiple efforts to reverse engineer the firmware.
> A free Bambu firmware will allow the Ukranians to continue producing another few million drones and save over a hundred thousands lives by ending the war.
If that were true, it seems to me, that Ukraine would have already done it if it was somehow standing in their way.
It is not 'standing in their way', it is revealing the secret locations where the Ukranians drones are manufactured. Several of these factories where discovered and Russia bombed them.
Picking up 3D printers that don't spy on you, modding them or even building custom ones is much easier than designing and building millions of custom drones, so I am sure they solved this long ago.
Like, really - a FDM printer is just a MCU board with a bunch of stepper drivers, a power supply, some frame, motors, thermistors & heating elements.
> Now is the chance for us outsiders to help Ukraine, by freeing Bambu firmware.
What you write sounds like an invitation to pro-Russia-minded people to sabotage these free Bambu firmware efforts. :-)
IMO Ukraine should start exporting their drones (for fun or spooking political adversaries) as a way to help the war effort.
I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry. I have only used OrcaSlicer to tweak my models, mess with parameters, and send the prints to the printers.
So other than Bambu getting all heavy-handed with a legitimate open-source fork of their slicer software (which is definitely not okay), I'm not sure I'm clear on what the kerfuffle is about. Are their printers now MORE locked down than before? Or maybe only certain models?
I have a P1S myself, and I find Bambu to be a strange company. They're one that has benefited tremendously from OSS while sometimes violating both the ethos and licenses.
They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network. That'd be like a laserjet routing through the cloud instead of going to your device. With nothing much in the way of encrypting your designs and protecting your data, it feels like this was done on purpose. Given the shameless track record of many (most?) Chinese companies on IP, my assumption is that they're mainly doing this to steal designs. The juxtaposition of their poor track record on OSS, what seems like a shady approach to privacy and IP protection, and the aggressive legal posturing - all sum up to what I think is a very untrustworthy organization.
Luckily my designs are in the "look at this trash" territory, so I don't have anything to worry about, but I certainly wouldn't use this for important work.
You have people in this very same HN submission complain that they want to send prints even if they are not in the same network. Their primary complaint is that Bambu Labs won't let them use their cloud in combination with OrcaSlicer. In other words, they like the Bamub Lab cloud, they want it, they think it is a good idea.
Basically, there are users begging for this feature.
You're the one underestimating the difficulty of setting up networking for the average non-technical user. Nobody is begging to have to setup tailscale, etc.
I have to setup video game servers myself and honestly it is such a pain in the ass even though I've done it hundreds of times by now.
Here is the problem: When it comes to networking, every home has a different level of connectivity and each home router has a completely different UI. Some people do not have an IPv4 address that can be used to make a server accessible on the public internet. They have CGNAT. It's the same deal with WebRTC. In theory WebRTC lets you do peer to peer connections between browsers. In practice there are STUN and TURN servers. TURN servers are basically the equivalent of Bambu Labs cloud for WebRTC. You perform an outgoing connection to an external server that has an IPv4 address with an open port.
Honestly, blame the sorry and user hostile state of networking. Decades have passed and we're all running into the same problems over and over again. If ISPs offered a standardized TURN/Tailscale equivalent, then connectivity could be guaranteed even in the absence of a cloud.
I didn’t make a recommendation (tailscale or otherwise), you should ensure you’re taking in the actual intent before writing a reply.
Why do you have to do that on a product you own that is running in your home?
I wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping telemetry en route, and it's convenient for them that using their app helps nudge you towards Makerworld (their ecosystem for 3d prints, which is presumably good marketing) but I very strongly suspect "make it effortless for non-technical users to use the device with just a phone" was the original & primary driver.
Others want to control their IoT when they're not at home or not in WiFi range (they may not even notice the latter). You can do it with a VPN, or perhaps port forwarding if you're lucky enough to have access to your router and no carrier-grade NAT, but that's even harder to set up.
3d printer users are more sophisticated than most, but I can imagine some artsy types owning them, as well as the kind of people who are very comfortable with a drill, soldering iron and a jackhammer, but who treat a computer as "that God-damned machine I need to use to buy the parts I need."
Networking filtering as an additional measure - sure. But it shouldn't be required to get sensible behaviour
Perhaps the kerfuffle is about making legal threats against open source developers.
I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about what you can do with their computers. Just because a client is open-source, doesn't mean you're allowed to use the server.
If you're using developer mode running everything locally (or remotely over your own VPN, like the author here) then I think this makes zero difference.
It's "I would like to take this free software so I don't have to write it, oh and by the way I want to make everyone dependent on me now for enshittification reasons, so kindly fuck off and let me use this software just by myself. I take, you no take. Understand?"
Bambu's blog mentions LAN Mode. What they fail to mention is that LAN Mode still requires their cloud service for authentication, i.e. they get to cut you off any time they want. They also removed the ability for third party software to talk directly to the printer, it instead has to go through their closed-source "Bambu Connect" handler running on the same computer, with very limited functionality, and only if Bambu Connect chooses to pass on the message.
Some time in 2025: firmware updates make user choose between cloud XOR locally. Enabling local mode allows using custom slicer, but disables cloud printing or monitoring. Folks were up in arms because they wanted both, and openness.
Latest fork: a specific new custom slicer impersonates UA to submit print via bambu cloud, so it gives the pre-2025 experience.
Bambu sues this new fork. Actual OrcaSlicer working locally is fine.
I don’t know what the fuss is about. This whole issue has nothing to do with the open source ecosystem.
It has everything to do with the part where Bambu does not authorize 3rd party programs to contact their cloud servers.
I totally agree that Bambu has their head up their ass here, but still, it’s not an issue that would make me want to choose another inferior or more difficult to use printer at this time.
I own a Bambu printer precisely because it’s the iPhone of printers. It’s a tradeoff.
If it ever enshittifies to the point of becoming a paperweight I’m personally not that worried about it. I paid under $300 multiple years ago for this printer. I know that’s not nothing and I don’t want to be wasteful but it’s not something I’ll be particularly upset about. It’ll be Bambu’s loss when I don’t buy their next products or when I stop buying their replacement parts and filament.
I don't want an open source slicer sending prints through their cloud services, because I don't want their cloud services. The value of being able to check on a print or start it from my phone is near-zero. I shoot it off a laptop in my office and check on it intermittently during the print from that same laptop. This has worked fine to-date on my machine, but the concern is clearly that Bambu's corporate interest is not in that use-case, it's getting as much of the ecosystem in-house as possible. They want to control the model side via markerworld, and have everything flow through the cloud.
One doesn't need to assume bad intent, there's pretty clear financial and UX incentives here that mirror a lot of Apple for example. But I don't think I'm out of line for not wanting to move towards that world under a company with Chinese ownership and in an environment where many western lawmakers are pushing for strict control of what the machines can be used for. It's a lot easier to implement DRM, copyright protections, and restrictions on what can be printed in a cloud-only world than one where open source software is sending gcode to a local printer.
I've got no need or intent to replace my machine, but the next one likely won't be a bambu. They're not the only ones who are now making a machine where it works as a tool and you don't need to have 3d printing be your hobby to be productive with it.
That automatically disqualifies Bambulab from my PoV.
Bambu Studio is literally a PrusaSlicer fork. You don't get to build on the community and then threaten it.
Bamboo not understanding the OS licencing when they themselves took from Prusa if I remember correct is pretty rich.
They are offering a cloud infrastructure that allows users to remote control the printer via their software. If they don't want users to use a non-approved software to access their cloud, they should just build auth around it and explicitly tell people that. The accessibility for users to utilize the printer without going through official software and cloud is a whole other can of worms of course.
This whole fiasco could have been avoided by not being so confrontational, giving their user base ideological ammo.
Louis Rossmann has decided to put himself in the crosshairs instead, with a video goading Bambu: https://youtu.be/1jhRqgHxEP8?si=BwfoCKxujd0XwNJ0
Here's what I don't get. How is infra load any different between someone using their slicer build, and someone using their code in another slicer (or a fork)? It's still (ultimately) the same human making the same requests. If they can't handle the load then the solution is to obviously carefully manage the supply of the printers, if your infra is incapable of handling more than 3 users (accurate figure going by the tone of their blog post), then don't have more than 3 of your printers in the wild at any single time. Problem solved.
This for me was the most telling.
Previously I bought an Ender printer for around the same amount. Never did get it to work. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic. I have other technical hobbies, astronomy for example. I tried making a telescope mirror with results similar to the Ender printer. I buy ready made telescopes, not telescope kits.
I have immense admiration for those who can and will make telescopes and 3D printers. I'm very interested in the base technology. But when I want to print something, or look at a faint fuzzy, I just want the system to work.
(Interestingly, I actually like star hopping, the process of finding an observation target with a finder scope and star charts. Go to telescopes have no interest for me. Go figure ...)
To me this seems like a failure of the U.S. corporate/economic system. We should be able to make a 3D printer that simply works. We should be able to make a drones that work as well as the DJI drones. (My understanding is that Bambu Labs was started by a group of former DJI engineers.).
I don't have any solutions here. Not buying a Bambu Labs printer means I don't get to print things in 3D. I would pay more, but whenever I look into the various alternatives that I'm assured are turnkey, they turn out to not be turnkey. And if my Bambu printer breaks I can generally buy a new one cheaper than paying someone who knows what they are doing to fix it.
I'll admit this kind of offends my geek sensibilities. I actually agree, at least emotionally, with Geerling. But I also agree that the U.S. military industrial complex should be able to make excellent consumer facing 3D printers.
If I were doing commerce with the 3D printer I almost certainly would be using something else. Maybe. For what its worth, I'm basically printing out puppet mechanisms and art figures. Occasionally a wall hook or missing part for something that I happen on a STL file for.
However, even that sounds suspiciously like a project in and of itself. I haven't had time to design and print anything in the last month. So I expect I'll keep rolling along like I am. Things could always change, though.
https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...
In short, these Chinese companies are pushed by the state, in essentially massive dumping. And not only that, they get Chinese hardware patents granted on open inventions from the wider 3D printing community as their own creation & then try to push those spurious patents also in the West.
I'm fairly certain user agreements have been used for suing makers of game cheats and other similar things. Certainly in the industry I work in, there was a company making third party software and integrating it with the industry standard tool without going through the official channels, which caused people to violate the user agreement when used. They got sued and settled.
>When you convey a covered work, you waive any legal power to forbid circumvention of technological measures to the extent such circumvention is effected by exercising rights under this License with respect to the covered work, and you disclaim any intention to limit operation or modification of the work as a means of enforcing, against the work's users, your or third parties' legal rights to forbid circumvention of technological measures.
You still need to form a valid contract - no notice, no assent, no contract.
If there's a gate that's being bypassed then this all changes but it doesn't seem like there is - and it doesn't seem like they can add one without breaking existing printers.
Yet! Enshittification is a given, even if not premeditated. Finding open solutions now is proper planning.
Imagine if pizza consisted of software and hardware and you only bought hardware but software could be changed by dev/seller. Now your pizza shrunk in size, changed taste, or could only be eaten by a fork that is supplied for free by the pizzashop, otherwise special chemical compounds would make it disintegrate if you'd try to eat it using your hands or anything else. Technically you still have that pizza you bought...
However, I hope you see that the behavior reported by Jeff here is just bad. They are either not understanding open source licenses or are acting in bad faith.
Like when you think of the App/Play store lockdowns, the new ReCaptcha attestation stuff, and other things that have a more authoritarian angle to it as of late, you can at least see how it happens: most of their consumers aren't technical and don't even know how to argue against it or why they should care.
With Bambu on the other hand, I'd think a good portion of its customers do actively care about this kind of thing. 3D printing just doesn't have the same market reach as computers and smartphones.
Also, it seems to me like there's eventually going to be a turning of the tide on all of these pushes (app stores included) and companies that are making these kinds of moves aren't seeing that writing on the wall.
Anyways, yeah, my next purchase will be a Prusa.
1. OrcaSlicer: so it's a fork of Bambu's official client, Bambu Studio - but it apparently still goes through Bambu's servers for printing? How exactly does that work? Does it also "impersonate" the User-Agent, and Bambu was okay with that?
2. OrcaSlicer-bambulab: if the goal of this fork-of-a-fork is to bypass Bambu's cloud servers, why would it still need to "impersonate" the UA and communicate with Bambu's servers (as Bambu claimed)? Wouldn't the whole point be to avoid doing that in the first place?
Orca Slicer was forked to improve usability and features, not to get around any cloud printing requirements, Bamboo added those later and removed the ability to print locally.
It has to impersonate to transfer a gcode file locally, which is another open standard.
Bamboo restricted LAN printing, that is the issue.
I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system.
The alternative is to run the printer in LAN mode (which OrcaSlicer has always supported) where the client connects natively over MQTT, but after Bambu added their cloud authentication, this requires putting the printer in Developer mode and severing the Cloud features.
Bambu doesn’t want to serve people who reverse engineer the new (again, closed source) binary blob.
All of this being about the AGPL is just disingenuous ragebaiting.
The receiver of the C&D should see a lawyer about what changes or user-facing messages might get Bambu to back off. This is a normal, solvable business disagreement, not an excuse for everyone to get their pitchforks out again.
Also: I run multiple Bambu printers offline and they all work fine via sneakernet without anyone's files going anywhere. People should stop acting like these devices are bricks when used without internet access.
I would doubt this is the case, Orca Slicer exists since 2022 and is very popular. This is not a "somebody just noticed a thing" situation.
yeah, just get a lawyer! not like that's an expensive thing to do as an individual, private, open-source dev, at the risk of being stuck in a legal dispute versus a corporation with deep(er) pockets.
I think the primary problem is actually more than just Bambu's behavior, it's that China is an authoritarian country, and most of the population not only accepts the idea of central servers monitoring and "moderating" behavior but largely may embrace it as a sensible thing to do. It's probably beyond Stockholm Syndrome to the point of much of the culture genuinely not completely even understanding the idea of why privacy and personal control is important.
Much of the United States is so far on the other side that they can't begin to understand the position Bambu is in. Large companies in that country just do not have the option to allow their users to bypass censorship and monitoring.
I do think it's actually great that this type of issue gets in everyone's face though and it's great people are fighting back. But realize that the problem is deeper than one company. It's the whole type of government and attitude towards it and technology.
He was right.
I'm a confused about the whole "3D printer sends prints to its manufacturer's server" issue. Because I wouldn't want to connect hardware device like a 3D-printer to a network in the first place.
Can I buy a Bambu Lab printer and just never hook it up to any network?
Will I be able to print from sd-card just fine?
Can I update the firmware from an sd-card?
If these two are possible, I would not have any problems with such a device. If they are not, I would not even think about getting such a device.
And when it comes to slicing software: Can I use any slicing software and all I have to do is load the hardware info of the Bambu Lab printer I want to use? Or do I have to use Bambu Lab Studio or a fork like Orca Slicer for some reason?
And while we are at it: Does command line slicing software exist? I wouldn't want to dabble with a GUI. I would want to define the parameters of a print job in a yaml or json file and then slice it like "./slice.sh config.yaml myobject.stl"
SD cards work but it's extremely less convenient than just printing straight from the slicer.
You can use any slicer you want but Bambu wants only their slicer to directly connect.
CLI slicing is not something you want in general. Visual confirmation of the toolpaths is very important to making prints as successful as possible.
Here it looks like you can connect Orca?
I guess you can do remote monitoring via Orca when you set the printer to developer mode?
Serious question: why not just release whatever you want but not tie it to your identity? Bambu demands OcraSlicer make changes under threat of litigation? OK, cool. Enjoy the 5,000 forks of OcraSlicer that implement that functionality in exactly the same way. Hell, post a notice that they were compelled to remove the feature, and that they're thereform removing the release x.y.z, with the sha256 hash of "...".
Now OrcaSlicer has complied, and the community has an semi-official way to make sure that the commits that were removed aren't modified when they get them from other sources.
Another aspect is that releasing something under copyleft without putting an identity behind it is toothless. Someone can copy it and now if you want to go after them, you need to out yourself anyway.
You buy this, you "vote" for this.
The open alternative exists. It costed more, but I saved a bit more and got it.
Vote with your wallet, where and while you can.
This will be the only legal way to own a 3D printer if WA HB 2320 or CA AB 2047 are passed. If you don't like it, call your representatives immediately.
What printers are similarly priced and have similar specs, for someone relatively new to 3D printing?
None, really. Prusa printers are good enough though. If you value freedom and privacy, its worth a few extra dollars.
I've got an a1 mini myself, and I'm not aware of anything comparable on the market, but there's a clear need for some competition now.
But you raise a good issue: are they selling these at a loss in order to leverage some sort of lock-in? If that's the reason they're so cheap, that's important to know.
I honestly wouldn't mind paying twice as much for something that's more open. But it's also an issue I haven't looked very deeply into. For my first 3d printer I just wanted something cheap and foolproof.
It's a much more interesting and dynamic place than before Bambu's market entry
Have you looked into Centauri Carbon ?
The Mk3 is also easy, and can be had for cheap now, but it doesn't have auto Z-adjust which is really nice. It's also noticeably slower compared to the latest models.
[1] https://store.creality.com/products/k2-k2-combo-3d-printer-l...
Surely people can check the traffic and build a server to answer similarly, no? Or is this much more than job management?
Maybe this is impossible and I'm talking out of my ass, but for me it seems like a perfect opportunity to completely remove the problematic party from the equation.
I don't see the ground the OSS community are standing on to demand Bambu provide free services.
Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?
This mentality is baffling to me. No, insurance isn't there so you can knowingly do risky things, it's there in case something accidentally happens.
Would you say the same about juggling chainsaws? "That's what health insurance is for"?
Absolutely crazy to me
Why wouldn't it? Unless you don't have enough coverage, it should cover all losses fully. Literally the point of insurance. You may not properly claim everything lost, but that's on you. Insurance claims 101: giving a very clear itemized list of everything lost in an insurance claim.
> and takes years to pay out in many cases.
Years? Why would it take years? Maybe 6-12 months, but you can get claims rolling relatively quickly. Most of the time is probably going to be your time spent itemizing all the stuff lost.
When the risk of a printer catching on fire and burning down your house is very, very low, why wouldn't you rely on insurance? You have the draw the line somewhere.
Perhaps one or two.
Prints regularly take ten+ hours to complete. No one is vigilantly guarding their printer during this time. Fire spreads so quickly in a house that a smoke alarm is often just a signal to get out, you don’t necessarily have the time to grab a fire extinguisher and put it out.
And how big is the risk, really? The materials that you use do not ignite so close to their melting point.
There are are also regular software checks for overheating or thermistor wiring failing & we know they are there and are enabled as we built the Marlin firmware ourself from source (which is quite easy once you properly configure it). Not to mention we are sure we are the ones in control over the firmware.
We also have a bunch of web cameras watching the printers print that we can monitor remotely.
There are people who are simply careless
There are people who think of the 3d printer as a toy, not as a piece of industrial (or semi industrial) equipment
There are people who are arrogant, who think they have figured out and solved anything that could possibly go wrong so they have made it safe to do
There are people who kind of think they are invincible and are just convinced that bad stuff won't happen to them
Idk. It's not a stretch at all for me to imagine this sort of person, based on the people I've met in the past. I mean people remove safety guards from power saws that are designed to protect you from losing fingers, so...
The main potential problem these days (in my view) is whether a print finishes without crashing or delaminating from the print plate, which also has workarounds... but that's only potential printer damage, not a fire.
https://www.reddit.com/r/anycubic/comments/1j4kfsr/guys_just...
But, it's not really straight propaganda that the well designed machines (Bambu, Prusa, and many other vendors) don't have these issues.
You can find equally alarming statements about all sorts of other poor quality goods.
I have never had an issue with fire with one of my machines, but I have had 3 or 4 of them fail because they detected inconsistencies with their thermistor, immediately removing voltage from heating elements until they can be convinced that the problem has been resolved.
IIRC Some enders shipped with a faulty marlin firmware that had faulty thermal shut off code, and you used to receive a pamphlet with the printer to update the firmware immediately. I suspect that a lot of people simply did not.
Dont know what this bloke did, but between anycubic and the kind of person who carries a flaming 3d printer in his arms, something went very wrong.
At worst the sprinklers above it will wash it but that’s in a catastrophic instance.
Maybe if it knocks itself down to the ground? But I worry much more about faulty wiring or stuff like that. And that's more a function of the brand and model
Not saying fires don't happen that way but let's say it's a failure mode that is a challenge to achieve intentionally much less accidentally.
Failed FET for instance. They tend to fail "on". Unless you have a highside FET shutting off the power (and that may fail too).
On my printer I have software watchdogs but I also have an entire "dumb" (no MCU) circuit that will shut off a large relay that goes to my heaters if any of it's failsafes are triggered. I have a smoke detector, secondary thermistors, etc.
There are a bit more things in the way of thermal fuses and heaters that are less likely to runaway on the newer commercial printers but I still think people need to take the risk more serious.
I have been building printers and printing since 2011 and I still prefer to not have my printer in my house where the family sleeps, even with the failsafes. It lives out in the shop with plenty of room around/above it in case of a fire.
And if you want to be outright malicious, you can disable maximum temperature control and do the same with much hotter nozzle rammed into the model - and even print an extra burnable model when you are at it!
Or count on the power supply or the wiring catching fire instead due to overload.
It is closer to a toaster or an oven than a water heater or HVAC.
Also...my last lease specifically said that I was not allowed to use the washer/dryer or oven when I was not home. So it is not a stretch to believe that the property owners will use those types of agreements to go against you when the insurance company denies your claim (this does and has happened with 3d printer fires).
All that being said...I have run 135hr prints unattended on my printers (not bambu). The risk may be low but it is not zero and it certainly higher than a water heater or HVAC.
But a modern enclosed bambu printer is a much better engineered device. Bambu is mature enough as a company that they've issued formal recalls for device issues before. This would never happen with the aliexpress specials that used to dominate the market.
Bambu printers (and other reputable modern printers) are being run unattended at scale all the time without issue.
I love their 3d printer. It "just works" like none I had before it.
But now they've killed their 3d printer business and all their stuff is absolutely dependent on their web services. So that thing is up shit creek without a paddle whenever they flip that switch.
It really hurts to think about replacing an expensive, WORKING thing just because it became abandonware.
Money is a bit tight, so I decided against prusa as my first printer.
I am curious if anyone has good experiences with alternatives for the p1s with regards to ASA printing?
I mean I print ASA with my Voron, but that is build it yourself and high level of tinkering.
There are alternatives like QIDI Q2. But .. it will probably not be as fire and forget as Prusa or Bambu.
The Chinese government subsidizes Bambu Labs, so it's pretty easy to understand why this is such a big deal for them. It's not like the CCP wants to democratize manufacturing. They want the data.
Then their org has the option to burnish or bury models that align with their goals.
Chamberlain/Liftmaster/MyQ is all the same company; they are a gross company that hates the idea of giving you control over your device. Zero LAN control story, Zero Homekit story, zero Home Assistant and no possibility of any of these.
Genie - whose "app" thing is called Aladdin Connect is the other one. There is a HA integration[1] for it, though it's cloud-dependent, no LAN story so again your ability to control it is subject the company's cloud servers being available, and to any future whim they may have. The Github for the plugin has issues reported, but no idea how widespread they are.
Looking at places like Home Depot it seems there's a brand called SkyLink[2] but it seems cheap in the bad way, and while it has its own "app" there seems to be no HA story whatsoever, so I assume kinda the worst of all.
Deeply uncomfortably, I would have to grudgingly acknowledge the practicality of buying from the gross Chamberlain, never using its MyQ BS, and connecting a RatGDO to it instead, which would give the best experience, even though giving them any business deeply offends me.
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/aladdin_connect/
[2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/SkyLink-Side-Wall-Mount-Quiet-Ga...
Except, you know, a UART?
It is unfortunate to reward those weasels for their bad behavior by buying their device, even if one substitutes their own "brain" and never uses MyQ. But yeah, that may be the only practical option.
First, there was their debacle where they broke HA connectivity just for fun, meaning I couldn't use HA or Apple HomeKit anymore. Then, after a pretty routine reset of the opener (I needed to clear out some old remotes and re-learn them) I found that in some recent update of the 'app' or whatever, they'd deleted my brand of opener from their supported list, due to some IP dispute of some kind, leaving it unable to learn the same remote it had learned the year before. So, as peeved as I had been to have to use their ad-laden app, the myQ device itself was completely useless to me.
Never again.
Irony is I just moved to a house with a brand new MyQ cloud-connected door. I bought a RatGDO anyway and will never buy any of the devices in the myQ ecosystem, even though some look attractive. Closed system on purpose = never buy.
Is there any more to read about this angle? China blocking Ukraine's access to the tech?
They rubbed people the wrong way launching the CC2 with multi-color support before they developed the multi-color add-on that was promised for the original CC. I didn’t plan on multi-color with the CC, so that didn’t personally bother me too much.
I recently got a Snapmaker U1 for multi-toolhead prints and love it so far - much less waste than a filament changer and I’m using it for more exotic prints like a mix of conductive and regular PLA in a single part that wouldn’t work well in a filament changer single toolhead printer.
And I still use my CC for occasional single color prints (recently it’s been dedicated to TPU but I’m probably going to move that over to the U1 so I can do “over molded” TPU+PLA prints).
In short, if you’re willing to spend more I’d highly recommend the U1 if you know you’d benefit from the toolchanger. CC is probably a fine budget machine but there are a lot of other similar budget corexy machines to consider these days as well (I got CC when it was groundbreaking for features at its price but competition has caught up by now).
They released the multi color system for $55. I've ordered and waiting for it but the printer itself has been pretty nice.
1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice
2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though
Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.
Printer is great though. I've never used a Bambu, but after a thorough round of Orca calibration this (at the time) newbie was able to get some really decent PCTG and even PA-CF prints.
Web interface can't hold a stable video stream.
That said none of this is surprising. Bambu Labs have been very candid about their playbook which is following Apple's lead. They want to be the Apple of printers, a very walled garden with high integration good UX and not a lot of freedom because they want to tightly control the full experience.
And that is going to alienate a lot of people and endear a lot of others. The only reason they've even paid lip-service to open source or open hardware is simply to get a foothold in an industry that had strong roots in that area. Now that they're a more established brand we should expect them to start bricking in the garden and adding controls.
Fortunately I think they've been a net-good for the printer landscape, they shook things up pretty hard and I think there's now more competitive models from other brands.
This article isn't about the fact that Bambu has a walled garden. They're slandering and suing an OSS developer for using open source code that Bambu published. And the reason Bambu publishes open source code is because they're heavily reliant on the open source community.
I agree their printers are good, and good printers help the market, but this behavior is unconsciounable and needs to have consequences.
I think we should go to court and beat Bambu into submission here.
same for breach National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
point: they enfrocing network access for their products (including USA), which are sensitive. so, maybe export control problems?
Is it though?
My understanding is that right now, you can run your printer in LAN or USB mode without Bambu's cloud, and this is supported natively by OrcaSlicer (or any slicer using USB), but you lose some of the Cloud monitoring features.
You can also use Bambu's cloud with their Cloud Connect app and gain those monitoring features while using a third-party slicer, but at the expense that you send your prints through their cloud.
Or, you can use Bambu Studio and get the "fully integrated" experience.
My understanding is that this plugin just replicated their Bambu Studio communication with the Cloud, and that it _enabled_ you to send your prints to their cloud, not _disabled_ it. Is there something I'm missing that made this valuable? (ie - did it do some hybrid where it could hack in the Cloud monitoring without sending the prints through the Cloud?) Otherwise, I think what Bambu are doing are distasteful but I don't understand all of the Chinese espionage hand-wringing or "stealing our files" commentary around this.
EDIT: I finally got to the bottom of this; there is a cloud-based RPC method called `bambu_network_start_local_print` where Bambu's Cloud would authorize a print using (ostensibly) only locally transferred data. The goal of this project was basically to pretend to be the Bambu plugin in order to authorize this method, which is otherwise locked behind Bambu's auth system. This makes more sense. I wish the commentary on this subject would actually explain this.
The Bambu printers work. Imagine the difference between windows XP and OSX. Do you guys remember the insane breath of fresh air it was to get a computer which just worked?
That's Bambu. Yeah they aren't open source there's all sorts of telemetry, etc. Nobody cares because they really just want to print things.
Having said all that, the hardware is very good. Software, not so much.
Which degraded their hardware usability so much, that it's literally much worse than a decade ago. Even basic functions like choosing which speaker should play or ... what content to play does not work properly.
Just another company to avoid by now.
New product launches by them feel less exiting (I don't want/need laser engraving capabilities in my 3D printer) and I agree with other commenters that these days, there are good alternatives. Unfortunately I have to say that wasn't around the time I bought the printer. When you just wanted to print things without making 3D printing a hobby, their machines were a no-brainer!
But yeah, bye bye Bambu Lab.
Only thing that's more annoying than their blog posts trying to "set things straight" is the "we told you so" crowd.
Bambus p2s and their ams2 pro have had more hardware reliability issues in 1 month than is normal
Wayyyy more than my p1s and ams combo
I think there’s also some issue in their firmware that needs to be rolled back or perhaps properly tested
Gonna sound harsh :
This isn’t a printer anymore … it’s AI slop
Bambu has every right to restrict or limit how their cloud service is used, even if they do it in a completely insecure and trivially reproducible way (a user agent).
I'm curious from a legal perspective - the user agent in the Bambu slicer is AGPLed, so copyright wise it seems anyone could put it in their own slicer too. Nonetheless, something feels wrong to me about saying you're a Bambu slicer when you're actually not. Bambu is going after it because of the user agreement, but is there any other legal standing for complaint?
No. Absolutely not. Cloud-first is privacy-second, and rental model with ever-changing fees and terms of use.
This is not necessarily true. There are technical solutions to preserve privacy, end to end encryption being a very common one. That being said, Bambu strikes me as a very competent 3D printer designer, but not so much a competent software designer.
> rental model
I don't think this really applies to a hardware company selling 3D printers. You can always still use SFTP or SD cards to print. A big selling point for them is the ecosystem and being able to, for example, find a model on the app while you're on the road, send it to your printer, and have it be done by the time you get home. If this weren't cloud enabled, most of their customers wouldn't be able to get it to work because things like VPN or tailscale are well beyond them.
* user agent spoofing has been common practice on the web for decades * Bambu's customers were bait and switched here. They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.
Imagine if you bought a car with Carplay/Android Auto. A year later, the manufacturer pushes an OTA update that locks Carplay behind a subscription. But they have terrible security, just trusting the car itself to say if it has a subscription, so you use use pirate software to bypass the restriction and get free Carplay.
This is a far more financially damaging outcome for the car manufacturer, closer to stealing than user agent impersonation, but I would still argue that its morally justified. Consumers should have a right to fight rug-pulls, especially a physical product. This behavior from companies would never have been acceptable before the internet.
They asked him to remove it and threatened to send a cease and desist. They didnt even send the cease and desist, which they very well could have. Hardly an accurate characterization.
> They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.
This just isn't true. You can still run it locally and still use third party slicers locally.
Part of me thinks that the particular kind of enshittification we've come to see with devices, where something that certainly needs no cloud has a hard cloud dependency baked in, is partly an accident of the networking environment everything has grown up in.
When broadband and then especially Wi-Fi caught on, using NAT was so practical, solving both the "how do we properly configure a firewall to only route good traffic" problem, and the "we don't have enough routable IPs for every smart toaster or baby monitor to get one."
Only after this reality and assumption had been completely baked into every home network and the devices used to build those networks, then we started to see IoT devices, which really benefit from remote access. Companies added cloud because it was the only way to make that work - and most of them didn't want to implement and support a different protocol for LAN usage when that wouldn't sell any more devices.
I wonder if we had started out with ipv6 before the wi-fi boom happened, and every device had a routable address, and wi-fi routers always had good firewalls, and UPNP had not launched with immediate security issues... I wonder if we would have seen much more direct connectivity enabled by companies who given the choice, would rather sell a device that didn't need anything from them to support, instead of a device they're obligated to run servers for (at least for a few years).
I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.
Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.
Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.
I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.
It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.
Correction is much harder than starting off on the right side.
Sure, a manufacturer that didn’t need to course correct yet doesn’t mean they won’t change their stance in the future, but the same is true for one that already course-corrected.
We see this with privacy eroding laws continually - legislators will “listen” and course correct if there’s pushback, only to reintroduce the bill in the next legislative session, repeatedly, until it gets passed.
I’d prefer the one that hasn’t yet signaled a desire to do something negative in the past to one that has, even if they walked it back later.
Someone who isn’t racist because they grew up in a progressive family just means they were lucky. They often have never been tested under pressure.
On the other hand, someone who grew up in a racist family and ends up not racist means their beliefs are battle tested. This is a real test of character — it also tells me how they process information.
What you’re describing is a third case where someone pretends to correct but has no intention to, which I do not think Bambu’s original act of opening of LAN access qualifies.
Now I think the other dimension here is that people are expecting Bambu to believe in open source. They might not actually, which is their own opinion to have, but that’s a different problem altogether. I believe in local access but not necessarily open sourcing of everything so from my PoV, Bambu’s stance is perfectly consistent.
From Bambu’s historical and continued actions, specifically including the orca slicer actions that this blog post was about, there is additional signal that LAN mode backpedaling was more likely an appeasement action than a shift in principles to embrace a more open ecosystem.
Plenty of situations would make me feel differently, but I'm fine with their restrictions in this case.
Doesn't it sounds weird to you? I mean, what the reason they have to blur the line? Are they just clueless? Or maybe they fight for some political reason, like an anti-corporate stance, and Bambu is just a convenient target for them?
I'm asking, what you think of them, because I can't understand you. Your take on the conflict is incompatible with behavior of the people opposing Bambu. Or rather it leaves no good explanations for their behavior. When I notice it, I start digging, because if the situation doesn't have a good explanation, it means I do not understand the situation. But you just accept your understanding, so you have some good explanation for people's behavior?
> Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.
The GPLv3 specifically was written to address a problem called "TiVo-ization", which is when a hardware vendor uses some trick (DRM, proprietary blobs, whatever) to prevent users from actually running modified versions of the software.
The AGPL, the license of this particular software, extends the GPLv3 with protections for users of network services:
> Simply put, the AGPLv3 is effectively the GPLv3, but with an additional licensing term that ensures that users who interact over a network with modified versions of the program can receive the source code for that program. In both licenses, sections four through six provide the terms that give users the right to receive the source code of a program.
https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2021/fall/the-fundamentals-of-t...
And on TiVo-ization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tivoization
The Linux and proprietary drivers situation is more complicated, but proprietary drivers on Linux are generally restricted to interfaces that Linux chooses to expose to them for that purpose. But the Linux kernel seems to take a narrower view of what constitutes a derivative work than was likely intended by the FSF in writing the GPL. Under a "traditional" reading of the GPL, those proprietary drivers are meant to be illegal. Whether some or all of the linking done by proprietary drivers in the Linux kernel is really allowed by the GPL or not is somewhat untested, I think.
Is that why Linux sticks with GPLv2 instead of GPLv3?
Linus' purpose in adopting the GPLv2 was something like "to avoid free-riders on his kernel code; if you make improvements upon the Linux kernel for some product, you have to share them with the users of your product".
The GPLv3 addressed a gap in the protections GPLv2 guarantees to end-users, namely that if a vendor locks down other parts of the stack (in the case of the Linux kernel and TiVo-ization, at least the bootloader), inspecting the and modifying the software can be useless for them in terms of the real freedom it grants those users— the device can just refuse to run the modified software.
For Linus, moving to GPLv3 would extend the domain of the GPL beyond the code of his project to the broader context in which it is used, namely the situation of the user. He sees this as inappropriate, in a way. He doesn't care about the broader context in which Linux is deployed or if some devices only allow you to run vendor-approved kernels. He sees the GPLv3 as changing what "GPL" means in a way that offends him.
For the FSF, the point has always been to use licensing as a mechanism to protect and promote the freedom of people using computers. The FSF's primary concern has never been the rights or conveniences of maintainers at all. It's not about "no freeriders with downstream forks who hide their patches", though that was an incidental effect of the GPLv2. The purpose is to use copyright licensing as a mechanism to inch towards a world where users who do computing— on their laptop, on their mobile phone, or on their TV's set-top box— can transparently inspect and modify all of the devices they compute on. For them, the GPLv2 had a vulnerability that made its function of protecting user freedom easily bypassable, and they patched it in the GPLv3.
But the question of whether linking against the kernel's public interfaces constitutes a derivative work is outside the scope of GPLv2 vs GPLv3 and not yet fully tested/settled by the courts.
Hopefully this context does make clearer, at least, the spirit of the license of the software Bambu inherited when they forked it from others. It's very much about letting users actually modify/replace the software running on their devices without restriction.
This is in no way equivalent. You can't sync filaments, you can't monitor printers in your slicer, you can't monitor prints from your phone. This is like going backwards at least 5 years.
I find this shallow take really annoying, as it tends to derail most discussions ("you have LAN mode, so what are you complaining about").
It is very dubious way to subvert GPL, even GPL2, not to mention [A]GPL3.
It was discussed many times that you cannot have close-sourced plugin for GPL host program, as loading plugin is linkage and it is covered by full GPL (only LGPL has linkage exclusion).
Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.
If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.
Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate an optional-but-complementary service at a loss for charity.
That's not a genuine argument, nobody "feels entitled" to anything. Bambu made a deliberate choice to architect the product this way, deliberately placed themselves in this gatekeeping position, and they're deliberately working towards removing any other form of access to our hardware.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but I don't think that's what is happening. They aren't doing anything to block OrcaSlicer or any fork from working with the printer using LAN-only mode. It's only if you want to use Bambu Lab's servers for essentially a remote-access solution (which, by the way, kind of defeats the privacy-oriented purpose of running some of these forks) that they're saying you should use their own software.
Thought experiment: the core of macOS (Darwin) is open source. Does that mean everyone running Darwin or a fork of it should be able to use iCloud services for free?
All this outrage essentially sounds like "since Bambu Lab's slicer is open-source, the open-source community should be able to point any slicer at Bambu Lab's servers to get free remote monitoring services". And I don't think that's right.
They did. Since the first update in early 2025 LAN-only mode isn't enough to use 3rd party software anymore. Eventually they (partially) caved to the extensive backlash and added "developer mode" which completely exposes your printer by removing existing access controls, coercing users into either giving up control, or giving up basic security in order to maintain full control of our printers.
> completely exposes your printer by removing existing access controls
If these printers are in LAN-only mode and you want to point 3rd-party software at them, don't you kind of expect the existing access controls (which are probably at least in part tied to cloud services) to be removed? Behind a LAN with developer mode on, you're generally going to (1) not be exposed to the internet anyway, and (2) probably know what you're doing and would be implementing access controls yourself anyway.
If you want a completely open (hardware and software) 3D printer, don't get a Bambu Lab machine I guess? A big part of the value of their printers is that they've managed to make everything so seamless. Some of that relies on a somewhat closed ecosystem. They're the Apple of 3D printers, but everyone keeps expecting them to be the Linux, just because their slicer (or parts of it anyway) is open-source. If openness is more important to you than those conveniences, go with a different brand. It's a good thing we have choices as consumers :)
No, and it's absurd that you would suggest that on a technical forum in 2026, and no, they're not tied to cloud services in any way. Do you also grant root access to anyone on your LAN, by default and without credentials?
> If you want a completely open (hardware and software) 3D printer, don't get a Bambu Lab machine I guess? [and the rest]
My mistake, I didn't realize you were just here to engage in bad faith bullshit and peddle the company's PR statements from last year. These changes are happening after we already bought our printers.
I'm sorry your experience has been so terrible or that you thought you were buying an open-ecosystem printer. I never got that impression, so I never expected it.
And in 2026, I wouldn't trust access controls on their own even if Bambu Lab did keep them enabled in this situation (who's to say they don't include a back door of their own?). I prefer security at the network level, enforcing access controls before any untrusted hosts can even see a machine that I want to protect on the network.
Why do you feel the need to justify your purchase in public and talk about how great the printer is? Bambu make good printers and nobody is disputing that.
And for the record, my own experience hasn't been terrible at all, it's been predominantly positive.
However that doesn't change the fact that their overall dishonest corporate behavior, pushing unjustified user-hostile changes after the sale, violating the AGPL license of Prusa slicer, and legally bullying independent developers is immoral, illegal, and generally indefensible. Nobody wants to live in a world where this sort of behavior is normalized.
Furthermore "LAN only mode" has been neglected and generally half-broken for years. It was a hobbled alternative before they broke it even further.
https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
> I prefer security at the network level
You do you, but the world has moved on since the 90s. Communication is expected to be end to end encrypted, credentials should be revocable, and you generally don't want to grant every process on your device unrestricted ability to set your house on fire.
Disgracefully, this is being done in the name of "security".
What phone and laptop does Jeff use?
Internet influencers - nothing against this one, I like his videos, I think I got JetKVM because of one video - are a persona which is different from their person. They sell something in their videos and do things in videos that are different from their true self. Videos are primarily done to drive more subscribers. I don't dispute that he might be an exception but he has >1M subscribers which makes being authentic and not driven by audience difficult.
Take LTT as an extreme example.
[Edit] I'm not judging Jeff or saying this is good or bad.
Not sure what that exchange was for, but I like it!
PS: Not a native speaker, don't know what "HN peanut gallery" means. But I like peanuts, though I think Peanuts are overrated. Though sometimes our dog looks like Snoopy, when her ears are flying.
2. A google pixel isn’t meaningfully more open than an iPhone (I depend on functionality that would be unavailable if rooted). This wasn’t meant to be an iPhone vs android debate. For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent.
"reverse engineering or writing drivers"
When I encountered Linux I was already too old to be interested in that kind of things. But I did disassemble C/PM code. I was interested in blue boxing, cracking of games, infinite life reverse engineering and hacking in the 80s though.
"For the purposes of this discussion they are equivalent."
Again it feels like you made some assumptions about me and what I wanted to say which are just that, assumptions.
“Inauthentic” was I still think a close enough reference paraphrase of your statement. Not a value judgement. You even used the word "authentic" in your thesis. And in general I wouldn’t necessarily disagree but I don’t see how it is necessarily related to their choice of personal devices. An internet celeb probably doesn’t use GrapheneOS because the limitations sucks for most people, not because of some calculated subscriber count play.
If you use an unrooted Pixel, why are we even having this conversation, and if not.. well maybe the dude just wants to use a secure wallet.
Regardless of this influencer's "real life" persona I see nothing incongruent about even their "influencer" persona using an iPhone. Therefore I see no relevance to anything in your original comment.
"So, this wasn’t a dick sizing contest"
You can say "I didn't intend this a dick sizing contest" but you can't say "This wasn't a dick sizing contest". Again this is based on your judgement.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Pine sucked all the oxygen out of the environment, with a shit dead-on-arrival product. Pinephone doent even work as a bloody phone.
Other Linux phones are 2-3 generations old, and priced at $700 or so.
So, we're stuck with Apple or Google. Not great choices either way.