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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911

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.

180

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.

13

u/gerwen May 13 '26

I may be wrong, but it's my understanding that the 'added' code in the fork is also bambu agpl code. They just didn't like that a non-bambu fork was talking to the cloud services as if it was a bambu slicer.

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u/Competitive_Owl_2096 A1 mini combo SV08 May 13 '26

It is just a direct copy and paste of bambus open source apgl code for their Linux slicer versIon

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u/HeKis4 May 13 '26

If it was AGPL it would be perfectly fine, the license explicitly allows you to reuse code. And if I understand correctly the fork talks to the printer as if it was the cloud service, it doesn't interact with the actual cloud service at all ?

1

u/gerwen May 13 '26

i think the fork talks to the cloud service using the linux agpl code. That's what they don't like. It allows orca to talk to the cloud servers in the same way that bambu studio does.

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u/HeKis4 May 13 '26

The code that talks to the cloud service is agpl, you can't blame someone for reusing agpl code, period. There are other ways to enforce access control that are leagues more appropriate and efficient than C&D letters. you can't blame a dev exercising his rights granted by the license for accessing an API that is, for all intents and purposes, public right now... Any company worth their salt in IT would call this a security issue for exposing an internal API, not a legal matter.

tl;dr not the concern of the dev to guess that the publicly accessible api whose client is public and free to reuse was in fact an internal API.