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Discussion (100 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
I have verified that my P2S in LAN mode never attempts to make external connections at all (blocked it anyway, of course) and OrcaSlicer + this plugin never attempts to connect to any of Bambu's servers.
My P2S is easily the best printer I've ever had, they really do make incredible machines, it's a shame they have created this ridiculous situation just to (as far as I can tell) collect telemetry.
https://bambuddy.cool/
It's excellent for monitoring and setting up automations around printer events, I use it all the time too.
Speed is not why I set my printer up this way though. I live in a state that may ban 3D printers unless they include invasive surveillance, so I wanted to get a high end pre-ban printer in case that becomes law.
Not to be too glib here, but its one of the paradoxes of "free software" which is there isn't any money generated by the licenses that keep it free. Where as "licensed" software has a revenue stream that is used to enforce the license against people who fail to honor it. The FSF can only do so much with their budget here.
There's a confusing part of the article where he says that what he believes is a violation is something that a judge isn't going to care about. I don't know if he's implying that the judges aren't capable of interpreting the AGPL properly, or if he's admitting that the legal argument isn't as solid as they thought it was when they started. It's a confusing thing to say next to the broad claims about violations.
And the saddest thing is that Bambu knows this. They know that people who give away software are not a serious threat to them. And it is especially galling that the value they have extracted out of that software will pay the lawyers that keep you from preventing them from continuing to extract that value and keep it for themselves.
[1] "Media reports have also indicated that Bambu Lab has shipped more than 1.2 million units, claiming a 29% global share." -- https://kr-asia.com/bambu-lab-nears-usd-100-billion-valuatio...
IMHO that kind of stuff would have to go through the WTO but unfortunately Trump gutted that one already way back in his first term.
https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-administration-continues-be-...
There is no way to stop it beyond getting CBP to block imports, which effectively amounts to shunning.
Unfortunately that seems to increasingly be the status quo these days, look at US companies and their attitude to IP when it suits them to ignore licenses for LLM training purposes.
Machines that take up rooms and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars existed a decade or more (probably 20 years, if I had to guess; patents) before hobby printers. I’ve not seen one retail printer that wasn’t based on the tech from giant commercial printers. And there is definitely tech in giant commercial printers that will never be retailized (laminated object manufacturing).
Now I am old and have enough hobbies and want things that just work.
Got an iPad, and honestly most apps actually suck and cost monthly subscriptions plus app price, got a windows PC for music and it's horrible and full of ads.
But these 3d printers actually just work.
From a customer standpoint I can't blame them, it's sad that they can't be at least a little less evil
Not sure if Bambu was already hated back then for stuff like this. At least not that much, it just wasn't super open sure.
At this point I get a new printer for free every few months because of makerworld and their weird point system, so until I actually do any business with it I have no real reason to change my platform right now.
It is selfish and short sighted, and it leaves their future impoverished, but in the moment they "got a good deal."
I think a valid view (not saying it's right) of this is: "some dorks in a country I don't inhabit gave away valuable code. I'm going to use it and I don't particularly care about what they think about it"
How much do you care about Chinese law? does that make you sketchy?
It's an easy thing to avoid the costs associated with complying with FOSS licenses because they FOSS people don't come after you. So instead of having a person on staff who is making sure the company is compliant and updating the web site with source as it changes etc etc. You just don't do any of that and not only do you save money not paying that person you don't have to bother the web site people every time you do a software update. So from a manufacturer's perspective it's a win.
That said, Chinese vendors selling to Chinese customers following Chinese law. All good. Chinese vendors selling to US customers and not following US law, that's bad. I don't see how Chinese law would be part of that discussion.
What makes them particularly sketchy is the hypocracy: they fully understand the concept of IP and they are using/abusing it to try defend their semi-walled garden.
The Bambu printers, at the time of their release, were an incredibly superior pieces of hardware and software that was priced very very well and, this was a really big deal, worked fully right out of the box.
It was a pretty clear choice in either dicking around with the tools, or actually using the tool to make things. They caused a huge shift in the industry because it was silly to NOT buy a Bambu, if you wanted to actually make things.
I love open source software, but I also know that a team of focused, dedicated, high skill, engineers, who are financially motivated with big paychecks, to do well, will often do a better job making something proprietary than a bunch of volunteers doing it for fun, on the weekends. Ffs, we didn't get a half ass implementation (thanks to shite 8 bit boards everyone was using) of motion/vibration compensation in all the open source firmwares, a tech from the 1960's, until right before Bambu's release. It's still not available in most. Pressure compensation was still relatively new.
Bambu shook the industry because it was better in all ways that mattered if you actually wanted to make something.
[1] https://www.fabbaloo.com/news/prusa-research-unveils-mk4-inp...
[2] https://www.3docity.com.au/blogs/3dprinting/corexy-printers-...
[3] https://toms3d.org/2025/02/11/finally-prusa-takes-on-bambu-c...
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/x3m76q/did_you_reg...
I wish I could talk better about them, but what a let down. I really hope someone really figures out how to put the screws to them over this GPL violation.
Studio is fully release IIRC, it is that "external" part which is the issue.
The linkage between that and the client should be soft enough otherwise for the server side not to inherit the responsibilities of the client. Though if part of their claims attempting to defend their current position suggest that linkage is more direct, then they are taking aim at their own foot somewhat.
Without the networking plugin you cannot monitor your printer or send prints to it remotely. You can copy files to a flash drive and print that way.
It’s absolutely insane how little they would have to do to be good community members and choose not to.
I honestly don't want another maintenance hobby. I just want something that works and doesn't cost an arm and a leg.
You are right to say Prusa is more of a hobbyist machine while Bambu is closer to a consumer appliance. But within the hobbyist spectrum Prusa is more on the light hobby side these days. My first printer was a Printrbot where I was hand-entering G-code to move the nozzle around and level the bed. Prusa is a dream compared to that.
I like Prusa as a company (and the guy), and I like the community around it. The machine is simple, keeps working, parts are available, and you can understand and repair it if you need to.
However I've seen so many non technical people having fun with 3d printers at a pure hobby level at this point it's hard to not recommend Bambu in some way.
(I don't understand people who build print farms from Bambu Lab machines at all; I do get using Prusas.)
Though I would caveat my assertion by saying that if the specific form factor of the A1 Mini (which is a nice thing) matters to you, and it well might, there’s probably no alternative for that single machine, to be fair.
But I would still choose something else.
Personally I think the “just works” 3D printer is largely the result of cognitive bias. It’s a machine tool that melts plastic: I don’t think this is the appropriate territory for “just works”. But that’s just me.
The other printers are basically custom designs by this point & you need to fix things sometimes - like recently erosion of the filament eationg away enough of the idler arm to slip from the forwarding wheel. But I don't mind, because I can easily fix all of that with either 3D printed bits or easily & cheaply available common parts.
I don't mind because I know I can fix ynathing on those printers! No issues like with 2D printers with closed firmware that worksa against you to print secret dots, only accepts locked down blessed overpriced consumables & fails to print if only one color runs low. Not to mention the bloody thing is basically unfixable & any drivers already suck + they will drop support on a whim anyway.
Seriously, would rather fix the 3D printer after every print than to deal with the level of bulshit common on 2D printers - and ot seems to me that Bambu is trying to achieve exactly that!
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the GPL is it's meant to block this kind of behavior. Certainly it's against the spirit of it.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.
Which is somewhat funny because a lot of high-impact piracy stuff is on Github and has been for years. GenP (Adobe) and Massgrave MAS (anything Microsoft) come to my mind.
It's questionable whether those two companies care that much about piracy, they make most of their money off enterprise, right? For a while I heard it theorized that Adobe and Microsoft largely let people get away with it, since it still keeps them in the ecosystem and therefore makes them likelier to use those products at work. Versus Bambu which probably still sells mainly to random hobbyists/home users
That is more than just a theory, their own documents (I can't remember if they were leaked or officially released as part of the big anti-trust case) stated that this was essentially their policy for poor eastern counties: if they wouldn't be paying for it anyway MS preferred them to use it rather than something else (like Linux, or something locally created, etc,).
It was less openly ignored in the case of students, or people using work licenses (or just pirate copies) at home, but the above and the lack of enforcement would indicate it was ignored for that reason.
Any import block would be on the hardware, not the software. And the software would need to be released for other territories anyway.
Or they can pay statutory maximum copyright violations of $120000 per copy violated.
Per copy.
This seems to be the main complaint: They ship a separate .so as a plugin.
Saying that an actual judge is not going to care about it is confusing. Is this or is it not consistent with the license? Why wouldn't a judge care about something that is a license violation? I don't get it.
> violating GPLv2 by not providing the source for a Buildroot-based Linux (and other copyleft components) used in the firmware of some 3D-printer models. He downloaded the 300MB firmware image from the Bambu Lab web site, but was unable to find the source or an offer to provide it.
This was the first hit when I googled it: https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/knowledge-sharing/open-source-s.... Includes the e-mail address opensource@bambulab.com for requests
Is there some other technicality that I'm missing?
> Bambu Lab needed a slicer, of course, so it started shipping a modified PrusaSlicer (as Bambu Studio), which it was able to get via the AGPLv3, but without shipping any source code or an offer to provide it. That continued up through 2022 or 2023, KĂĽhn said, until the pressure from the 3D-printing community effectively forced Bambu Lab to make a source release, which was, as is almost always the case for a first release, not the actual corresponding source code.
I googled Bambu's first Kickstarter. It shows July 2022 as the estimated ship date.
The BambuStudio repo has public issues from July 2022 with public user comments - https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/12
So the repo was public and available around the time that the Kickstarter ended. Seems fair? He acts like they were refusing until the community forced them to do it a year later, but the repo was live and open when the printers shipped.
I get that Bambu is supposed to be the enemy and we're not supposed to defend the enemy unless we want a lot of downvotes, but the reporting on this issue seems lacking any fact checking. I didn't try very hard but found contradictory evidence in the first Google link for several of the claims. The article is quoting someone speaking from memory to an audience so mistakes are understandable, but I would at minimum expect some cursory fact checking for someone reporting on it.
Software and services aren’t the same, and the anticapitalist zealots at the FSF can’t square this circle no matter how hard they try.
I do believe that the GPL will eventually be broken. However, it won't be broken in ways such as happening now. It'll be broken when some company is able to show the court that they were doing a lot of things to ensure they weren't going to violate the GPL. And yet a rogue employee, unknown to the rest of the company, violated it despite being told not to. I don't know exactly what the courts will decide in this case. It's still going to come down to the copyright violation. However, it likely won't be a source code release. The GPL will hold up, they will just say the written requirements are to much and ??? . But again, this will only happen after the courts take a very detailed look at all the things the company is doing to ensure they didn't violate the GPL in the first place, which means we are likely looking at many, many years before the first such case. Anyone who isn't aware of the GPL and taking a lot of active effort to ensure they're not violating it, they won't be able to pull off this defense after the fact.
If your response is "Let's force TPP-style international trade courts to force AGPL compliance", well, you're the globalist that Bernie Sanders rightfully warned about and people like trump pretended/lied about being against as justification for why they get elected. I hope you never get what you want. The same crap will be used to patent surgical procedures and other IP in ways that are horrible for society.
You want to do fake software viral communism that's incompatible with how the legal system operates? You're poor as shit and can't hire good lawyers vs business because capitalism isn't favorable to you? That's why you're supposed to engineer something better than crapitalism. This is a grand challenge for the FOSS movement and why I am still broadly supportive of the reasons why someone like RMS votes/voted for the green party (and yes I know they are these days loony/crazy/compromised by the FSB)
Real FOSS is MIT. Learn to make your fake viral communist license have teeth or forever persist in this doomed world you have created.
That is not what people are asking for.