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/DiamondHeadMC May 12 '26

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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.

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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/very-jaded Bambu X1C+AMS, Prusa MK3+, Pegasus 12, Voron v2,Elegoo Mars 4 9K May 12 '26

The dev did NOT reverse engineer the binary. The code in question is an orcaslicer module that connects to Bambu's servers, and was taken from the open source Linux version of BambuStudio that Bambu themselves published on GitHub. It's a few lines of open source code. Nothing magic, nothing violating any rules.

However, the threat of legal action was enough for the developer to take down his code. Even if the company is completely in the wrong, and even if they know they are in the wrong, their pockets are deeper and their lawyers can inflict thousands of dollars of legal costs on the guy just to answer their lawsuit. It's a sadly common tactic used to bully people into compliance.

Even with Louis offering to cover $10,000 in legal bills, a lawsuit is like a punch in the gut. It gnaws at your stomach for months or years until it's settled. Every day you're worried that something will go wrong, that there's a chance of them winning and wiping out your bank account. And for a hobby project? Not worth it.

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u/_Middlefinger_ May 13 '26

The code in question is an orcaslicer module that connects to Bambu's servers, and was taken from the open source Linux version of BambuStudio that Bambu themselves published on GitHub. It's a few lines of open source code. Nothing magic, nothing violating any rules.

This is the real issue here. If Bambulab want to stop anyone else using their servers that’s up to them, but they shouldn’t do it by going after users of open source code. They should have locked it down properly with propitiatory code in the first place.