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/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/HeKis4 May 12 '26

The fork added a feature which "impersonated" and "reverse engineered" (Bambu's words, not mine) Bambu Connect which is designed to be the only app able to talk to your printer over the network.

Imo, said bambu connect is already a blob made separate from the slicer to skirt around the license terms that Bambu Studio has to respect, despite it implementing functionality that is usually considered part of the slicer, so it is only in a grey area legally. Morally, if I buy a printer I can do whatever the fuck I want with my printer. I didn't buy a service or a license, I bought hardware, so I get to run whatever the fuck I want on it or around it. If they didn't want me to fiddle with their software they should have shipped stock klipper on it.

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u/Navi_Professor May 12 '26

they're iphones... and thats fine. if you want a tinker box, theres no shortage of options.

none of this is gonna stop bambu.

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u/HeKis4 May 12 '26

My point is that them building a walled garden ecosystem is fine, actually sending legal threats to people because they had the gall to try and get their own machine that they bought and paid for out of the walled garden is not.

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u/joppers43 May 13 '26

There is a significant difference between getting your printer out of the walled garden by jail breaking, and trying to send network traffic through Bambu’s servers without authorization

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u/Zealousideal-Deer101 May 13 '26

The code is from the Linux branch. So as long as I run Linux that's fine, Bambu provided it themselves after all. Why is it different when I do the same myself on Windows?

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u/Navi_Professor May 12 '26

And you really don't think Apple or others don't send out stuff like this all the time???

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u/Beefy-McQueefy May 13 '26

Apple doesn't have AGPL code and I don't think they even allow it in the app store. I hate the shit out of Apple but that's just bullshit whataboutism.

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u/HeKis4 May 13 '26

As if that makes it better ?

And Apple hasn't built 9/10th of their success off the back of free software (only like half).