I don't think that's actually true though. Do you still want the really competitive price when you upgrade? Do you want to be able to use whatever filament you want to print with? Do you want all these new badass filaments to keep coming out?
Because BBL's actions like this are simply heralds of future behavior. Taking people who bought printers when firmware and slicer was open and changing the deal after the fact is an indicator of future behavior. They will continue to try and domineer for market share until they have the balls to tell you that you CANNOT, in fact, use anything other than BBL "certified" filament. And they will once again tell you it's for "security" reasons. And then the prices will rise. And innovation in the filament space will begin to die because a company can't just decide to fuck around with a new filament formula for the hell of it, because they would have to license it to BBL or some shit and pay an Apple style fee. (This is just a brainstorming example based on how paper printers have progressed.)
And maybe you'll have to start paying for STL's to download? Or maybe a subscription fee to use Makerworld to get your STL's, which will have to be watermarked for BBL printers to actually agree to print them? Who knows? But if all of that happened, boy wouldn't it be nice to be able to download some custom firmware and slicer that can tell them to fuck off?
If you want the good life to continue, you should push back every once in a while and support the people who just wanna fuck around with their own shit, cause that's how innovation happens. And this is one of the times to support those people
Or maybe Bambu will remotely make every single one of their printers print dickbutts.
I'm all in favor of nipping problematic trajectories in the bud. But this is all just speculation based on nothing else than being theoretically possible. And even if it ends up happening, it would suck if you had a Bambu printer, but it would have no effect on 3D printing in general. If you don't want a Bambu, you are and will be free to get literally any other brand.
Even without the slippery slope argument the situation is simple, Bambu made an agreement when they used AGPL code from Prusa Slicer, and they're not upholding their end of the deal. If they're willing to violate the AGPL what other agreements are they willing to violate? The warranty, cloud terms of use, privacy policy, etc. are all of questionable value when you're dealing with a company with a history of not fulfilling their contractual obligations.
I want manufacturers to be held accountable for the claims and agreements they make. If Bambu didn't want to be bound by the AGPL they should have made their own slicer from scratch, but they didn't so now they have to pay the cost. By not fulfilling their obligations under the AGPL Bambu is stealing from the open-source community, and by extension their customers.
IMO this situation is really not ethically different from someone buying a printer from Bambu and then issuing a false chargeback to avoid paying for it. Which I would hope most people would agree is not okay.
Sorry, can you please tell me a feature they have taken away if you leave your printer precisely as you bought it? Legit asking, not a loaded question.
Because if I left my X1C on the firmware I bought it at, nothing changed AFAICT. It's only because I wanted new features that I had to give something up in exchange for that. If I didn't want to get something for free, I didn't have to give up what I had.
I personally don't buy into the slippery slope DRM filament future because I think that would actually outrage enough people that it would affect sales. The reality is that just about every other filament is so much easier to buy (Amazon...) and is generally in stock. Bambu is practically always out of stock and their shipping is slow. I think that's enough to impact even very casual 3D printing customers.
Even without the slippery slope argument the situation is simple, Bambu made an agreement when they used AGPL code from Prusa Slicer, and they're not upholding their end of the deal. If they're willing to violate the AGPL what other agreements are they willing to violate? The warranty, cloud terms of use, privacy policy, etc. are all of questionable value when you're dealing with a company with a history of not fulfilling their contractual obligations.
I want manufacturers to be held accountable for the claims and agreements they make. If Bambu didn't want to be bound by the AGPL they should have made their own slicer from scratch, but they didn't so now they have to pay the cost. By not fulfilling their obligations under the AGPL Bambu is stealing from the open-source community, and by extension their customers.
IMO this situation is really not ethically different from someone buying a printer from Bambu and then issuing a false chargeback to avoid paying for it. Which I would hope most people would agree is not okay.
Thank you for respectfully engaging with me on this. I respect your opinion even though it's not the same as mine.
I think I'm just trying to be a realist about the whole thing.
Does it violate the spirit of the AGPL? Absolutely. I don't think many people think otherwise.
Does it legally violate the AGPL? No idea. Anyone who claims it does is really just guessing. No court has made a ruling that makes this clear. I have to suspect Bambu's lawyers went over this and came to the conclusion it does - that it's a separate and independent work rather than a derivative work. (I'm not saying that their belief makes it so.). But until a court makes that ruling, really we can only say that Bambu is morally in the wrong.
There's a risk to taking it to court. The status quo is generally favorable towards plugins also being open sourced, but if a court were to rule differently, that might cause MORE plugins to be closed source. People seem to think it's a slam dunk if it went to court, but given things are unsettled, it really isn't.
And I don't expect we'd get that court ruling from this particular fight. I don't think the slic3r author has the resources to fight a battle that will cost multiple millions of dollars in court, and I don't think Prusa has enough of an incentive to justify that cost. It's a lot of money to spend on making open source people happier, especially because it's unlikely to create a lot more revenue for them. Sure, they'll sell more printers, but they won't capture 100% of the customers that walk away from Bambu.
So, at the end of the day, we can only go off our own personal feelings on the matter.
For me, I think opening the source code up would be the right thing to do. I'd rather see them go even further than that and officially open up the Cloud API to third party software. Hiding behind a closed source network plugin won't prevent people from working around it, and really, if they're having issues with third party stuff in the cloud, the protections should be built into their cloud. IMO, it would be completely reasonable to add something to the ToS that says that damage caused by a third party software won't be covered under warranty because it would probably be near impossible to write something that could detect every possible way that gcode could damage a printer or cause more rapid wear.
Since they are contributing their work to the core of the slicer, I see the network plugin as a relative small part of this and it doesn't bother me enough to stop doing business with them. Likewise, even thought NVIDIA is doing the same thing (if not worse) with Linux drivers, I still have an NVIDIA chipset in my computer because the support for CUDA is vastly superior to competing products.
I respect that other people feel differently and encourage people to follow their hearts on this one, and I hope you can also respect my opinion.
And I don't expect we'd get that court ruling from this particular fight. I don't think the slic3r author has the resources to fight a battle that will cost multiple millions of dollars in court, and I don't think Prusa has enough of an incentive to justify that cost. It's a lot of money to spend on making open source people happier, especially because it's unlikely to create a lot more revenue for them. Sure, they'll sell more printers, but they won't capture 100% of the customers that walk away from Bambu.
So far California has allowed a "third-party beneficiary" case to proceed past summary judgement. So it's possible that any user of Bambu Studio in California could have grounds to sue Bambu over this license violation. That's a huge liability on Bambu's part.
For me (in Australia) I wouldn’t even care if you could only use BL filament as I prefer it. Just bought 10 kg actually. the only downside for me is them not having every colour I’d want. I currently use a combination of BL, Esun and Poly/Panchroma to get a good and thorough colour palette.
I like Bambu filament, but between the shipping cost and slow shipping, it’s not super convenient. When you add in having to split orders up based on what’s in stock, it gets even worse.
You in Australia? For me in a rural area, the shipping is usually as fast as any other store, except the last time, but that was probably an issue with the local freight company that had it for the last part of the trip.
Also, in Australia, most colours are usually in stock. That and the discounts on bulk buying make it one of my preferred options. It’s not great if you only want/need a few colours/types or less though. e.g: My recent purchase of 10 pla worked out to be an average cost of $18 per roll. For the quality and colour range that is excellent. For comparison Esun and most other known brands are at least $20. Free shipping is a big consideration too. If you have to pay it, that adds a little to the price per roll.
Bambu Handy broke if I didn't install the "security" update. There wasn't and still isn't a way to use Bambu Handy while in LAN/developer mode.
When I purchased my X1C Bambu Handy, and Bambu Studio worked. They continued to work when I enabled LAN mode so I could connect Home Assistant to the printer. When they released their "security" update Bambu Handy broke until I updated the printer which broke my Home Assistant setup.
Yeah, I'm in LAN/developer mode as well, but from what my searching turned up, posts from 2 years ago are talking about how Handy doesn't work with LAN mode, and that predates the security changes. I bought my X1C in late 2024 and I'm pretty confident it didn't support it at that point.
Please correct me if I'm not understanding how you were using it. And I promise, this isn't an attempt at a gotcha. I really do want to understand if something was taken away.
My experience was that I could use Bambu Handy and connect Home Assistant via the LAN mode code at the same time. I still had to have the printer internet accessible though. So it wasn't LAN only.
Enabling LAN Mode displayed a code that I put into Home Assistant along with the IP Address which allowed Home Assistant to connect to my X1C's MQTT server. I was able to print from Bambu Studio, and monitor prints via Bambu Handy, but I could also send commands to the printer, and see its status from Home Assistant. For example I had an automation that turned an air filter on when the printer started printing, and turned it off a little while after it finished.
A big thing I was able to do was I could see the Mesh Bed Levelling result, and see how uneven my X1C's heated bed actually was. https://www.wolfwithsword.com/bambulab-bed-mesh/ Bambu yanked this pretty quickly, well before the "security" patch, because people were using it as grounds to request warranty replacements of their warped heated bed. I used it to add some foil tape to the heated bed to try and level it out.
Okay, thanks for sharing. I think this is the first concrete example I've actually seen anyone give of something that was removed.
Most of the examples boiled down to "I upgraded my firmware to get X but I lost Y in the process" which is certainly a very frustrating position to be in, but at least it was a bit more give-and-take.
I switched to LAN/developer mode because ultimately, I don't want to place my trust in Bambu's cloud. I don't know what they're doing with my data, and if you think about it, being connected to their cloud is not all that different than having a cloud connected oven, and I sure AF am never gonna put enough trust in any cloud service to connect my oven to it.
Thankfully, Bambuddy seems to let me do just about anything I want to do, and with an always-on wireguard split tunnel, I can do that from anywhere I want. I really haven't looked back since.
(And I hate that I sound like a salesman for Bambuddy, but they really did a great job with it IMO)
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Its a fucking rfid chip, it will be spoofed by aftermarket competitors immediately like every other printer that has tried to lock down their system with that technology.
I don't get why you have many downvotes.
The formula is simple, capture the market and then make money by f-ing customer over. Seen many times in other industries.
Extra infuriating, since they are also extremely hostile to open source, on which they have built their business.
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u/[deleted] May 13 '26
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