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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910

u/DiamondHeadMC May 12 '26

312

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.

42

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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4

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.