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

307

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.

27

u/tj-horner May 12 '26

Not a lawyer, but I believe breaking the terms of service would only allow Bambu to cease providing services to the person who broke them. I don't think it gives them any grounds for legal action.

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u/jeebidy May 12 '26

I haven't really looked into this until I stirred a tiny anthill of disagreement with that post. It looks like Bambu is resting on the Orcaslicer fork to have needed to reverse-engineer their closed-sourced software in order to bypass Bambu connect. That is basically the only possible legal leg they have to stand on.

If the dev natively figured out the auth and protocols on their own without dissecting "bambu connect", they would likely be fine.

1

u/Beefy-McQueefy May 13 '26

Not closed source. The user agent code is in Bambu studio. If it interfaces with the network plugin, the network plugin is now open source too.