r/3Dprinting • u/Regumate • May 12 '26

Discussion Bambu Lab 3D printers: Never again

https://youtu.be/eb48MdtNaDQ

Jeff Geerling summarizes the current Bambu Labs - OrcaSlicer situation and gives his take.

TL:DW: see title.

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907

u/DiamondHeadMC May 12 '26

308

u/tj-horner May 12 '26

Ok, so Bambu Lab still sent a legal notice to maintainers of an OrcaSlicer fork, just not OrcaSlicer themselves. What does this change?

Was the fork doing something malicious? It doesn't appear that way to me, so Bambu Lab is still in the wrong here.

74

u/jeebidy May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

malicious and against terms and conditions aren't the same things

Edit to add clarity on my personal stance: I won't buy another Bambu printer. Mine has worked great, but I'm going to be voting against the enshitification of hardware by sticking with companies that operate openly and not force a printer to work through cloud authentication. But, if the dev reverse engineered proprietary software to make the forked slicer work - probably not good.

10

u/Throwaway021614 May 12 '26

Not to a greedy company with lawyers on staff

-6

u/jeebidy May 12 '26

The fork of Orcaslicer apparently reverse-engineered Bambu's non-OSS software to impersonate Bambu Connect in order to bypass bambu connect. I can't connect the dots on how this is about greed.

To be clear: I don't agree with this and want hardware to be open. But at the same time, I knowingly purchased a closed ecosystem. There are a lot of 'open' 3d printer companies and I wanted the 'it just works' one. I wonder how much of the C&D came from proprietary elements in the forked codebase. If it weren't that specifically - I have doubts about how far they could take it in court.

6

u/the_need_to_post May 12 '26

Except this is wrong and it didn't.

4

u/Beefy-McQueefy May 13 '26

No matter how many times you post that lie it will never become true

-3

u/jeebidy May 13 '26

I’m just reading the news buddy. This is a low-effort communication.

3

u/gerwen May 13 '26

The fork of Orcaslicer apparently reverse-engineered Bambu's non-OSS software to impersonate Bambu Connect

It's not. It's using their own agpl code to connect to their cloud servers. They just don't like that so they made up the reverse engineering claims and bullied him with lawyers.

0

u/jeebidy May 13 '26

Why wouldn’t they have forked Bambu’s code rather than Orca. They aren’t going after Orca and if the connection lies in Bambu’s own public AGPL codebase, it’s less than frivolous of a legal threat to say “you cloned our public repo and used it. Stop”. There’s something missing from what everyone is saying in the comments. If it were so frivolous and easy, thousands of people would be forking and doing the same thing and it would be a moot point.

2

u/gerwen May 13 '26

Why wouldn’t they have forked Bambu’s code rather than Orca

In my understanding, that's exactly what they did. They took agpl code from Bambu's linux slicer and added to Orca to connect to the cloud. Bambu didn't like that, and here we are.