Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

If you don't do any 3D printing, it's hard to understand the difference between bambu labs and nearly everything else.

The Bambu printers work. Imagine the difference between windows XP and OSX. Do you guys remember the insane breath of fresh air it was to get a computer which just worked?

That's Bambu. Yeah they aren't open source there's all sorts of telemetry, etc. Nobody cares because they really just want to print things.

Yeah, I was considering getting into 3D printing and Bambu was one of the finalists. It's good to have one less brand to think about, makes it a bit easier to decide.

They will lose relevance soon anyway. Toolchangers are the future and their offerings on the matter are kinda shitty at the moment. Their nozzle changing solution is overengineered.

This is the dude that creams himself everytime Apple releases a computer, he doesn't give a lick about ownership at a principled level, only if it affects him personally.

I'm supportive of Jeff's general philosophy towards open source, but this feels a little disingenuous. Did Bambu mishandle the situation? Absolutely. But we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service. It's easy and convenient. The slicer is still open source, and you can still use their printers without the cloud. (Yes there was some fighting after their security issue in 2025, but they did put in an effort to maintain compatibility with third party slicers even if it was misguided and/or out of touch.

Bambu has every right to restrict or limit how their cloud service is used, even if they do it in a completely insecure and trivially reproducible way (a user agent).

I'm curious from a legal perspective - the user agent in the Bambu slicer is AGPLed, so copyright wise it seems anyone could put it in their own slicer too. Nonetheless, something feels wrong to me about saying you're a Bambu slicer when you're actually not. Bambu is going after it because of the user agreement, but is there any other legal standing for complaint?

I installed the third party X1C firmware and locked it down last year. Their whole excuse about security was nonsense then and it’s nonsense now. Every step they take pushes them closer to fully locking their printers down to be either subscription based or use their (always out of stock) filament.

They're not just abusing the open source social contract, they're abusing people's non-confrontational nature to bully them.

This is a pretty clear case in court to me - Bambu would lose it.

I think we should go to court and beat Bambu into submission here.

So happy to see this climbing HackerNews. I hope someone at Bambu gets their head out of their ass after this debacle, but I'm not holding my breath

To me, this looks like state pressure rather than a normal business decision. I cannot see a convincing reason for it otherwise. If these printers are used in professional settings, users may be unknowingly sending prototypes, designs, and internal project data to China. That kind of access would be extremely valuable, especially if the company can identify the buyer, their location, and their field of work. Given the relationship between Chinese companies and the Chinese state, corporate espionage seems like the most plausible explanation.

> Some people are okay with using OrcaSlicer and printing through Bambu's cloud. It's convenient if you're on the road and want to start a print on your printer at home

Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?

I wish I could better articulate the rage I feel that is accumulating strand by strand, year by year, for the corporate over-lording, abusive, user-hostile, person-hostile practices that are rapidly normalizing across the modern capitalist playbook. I have no outlet. The pressure just builds.

Calling out bad behavior out to get any group of people to change is dead. Nobody with any bit of power gives a fuck any more. It's really, really bad. Give as little power away as you possibly can. "Open Source" has to be end-to-end to work at all. Even a tiny bit of proprietary spice will eventually spoil the entire dish.

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Hacker News - the place where shills love to make reasonable sounding arguments.

I own a H2C and have been a huge fan of bambu for a few years, full disclosure.

I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.

Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.

Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.

To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.

I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.

It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.

Wow, I'm surprised how much I disgree with the HN consensus here. This feels to me, (almost) entirely in Bambu's side here. I'd say their security sucks and they should have implemented some kind of secure accounts so random person without account can't interact with their service like 1000s of other services. But, otherwise, they're right that you don't have a license to their service, only to the AGPLed software.

Bambu Lab has made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think this is one of them. And I'm a big supporter of open-source software.

Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.

If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.

Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate an optional-but-complementary service at a loss for charity.

> I'm one of those crazy ones who likes to own something they purchased, and not have the company watch everything I do with hardware I paid for.

What phone and laptop does Jeff use?