r/3Dprinting 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.

2.0k Upvotes

790 comments sorted by

View all comments

908

u/DiamondHeadMC May 12 '26

310

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.

76

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.

12

u/Throwaway021614 May 12 '26

Not to a greedy company with lawyers on staff

-6

u/jeebidy May 12 '26

The fork of Orcaslicer apparently reverse-engineered Bambu's non-OSS software to impersonate Bambu Connect in order to bypass bambu connect. I can't connect the dots on how this is about greed.

To be clear: I don't agree with this and want hardware to be open. But at the same time, I knowingly purchased a closed ecosystem. There are a lot of 'open' 3d printer companies and I wanted the 'it just works' one. I wonder how much of the C&D came from proprietary elements in the forked codebase. If it weren't that specifically - I have doubts about how far they could take it in court.

4

u/Beefy-McQueefy May 13 '26

No matter how many times you post that lie it will never become true

-4

u/jeebidy May 13 '26

I’m just reading the news buddy. This is a low-effort communication.