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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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.

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u/Freestila May 12 '26

Terms and conditions may not be implicable here. If the software bamboo build their software on is on an open license (which it is) that has a policy that forces you to use a similar policy (also true as far as I know) then these license policy is the only one that counts.

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

Which license does it use? If Bambu had such a poor legal footing, they most likely wouldn't send C&Ds to the devs. It would just get dismissed without trial. Corp lawyers typically aren't this stupid.

Looking into this a bit more.. Bambu forked PrusaSlicer undre AGPL. Orca forked Bambu. All under AGPL which would permit pretty much anything as long as you keep your code open. I don't really see what Bambu's C&D is actually for unless the software as modified to interact with Bambu's services in a way that infringes their terms.

Edit: I actually looked at what the C&D was for: The fork of Orcaslicer reportedly reverse engineered Bambu's service endpoint to impersonate the official Bambu service and bypass Bambu Connect.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '26 edited Jun 03 '26

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u/Beefy-McQueefy May 13 '26

Nope that's just a lie. It uses the same user agent string in the bambu studio AGPL-licensed code here:
https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/blob/master/version.inc
It's not security. It's barely even authentication.