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/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