101–110 of 247 posts
I have no issue with this. Bambu makes good products, the AGPL does not give you a license to access someone else's cloud servers.
That is not what people are asking for.
It's been pretty weird and disappointing to see the way Bambu has taken over with these practices. 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 attr…
Haven't these (A)GPL violations been there for most of the company's history? It's the context around them that changed. 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 w…
But IIRC the plugin itself contains code covered by the open source licenses, either that or being directly linked the way it is is considered sufficient for the requirements of the license to apply.
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It was really depressing when I realized that people will buy a sketchy product which is hurting the community and makers of non-sketchy products because "its cheaper and its not like my purchase is gonna change things one way or another." It is selfish and short sighted, and it leaves their future impoverished, but in the moment they "got a good deal."
What community? It's a tool.
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I wouldn't call that a win, though. I have a Bambu printer and it's very difficult to reproduce their tuning on open-source hardware or software. I think Klipper has vibration compensation now, but pressure advance and some other things require some tinkering and waste in order to set correctly, and you have to re-do them on any new nozzle/filament/temperature. Deciding nobody can have the software at all is complete…
> Deciding nobody can have the software at all is completely opposite to the spirit of the license. Any import block would be on the hardware, not the software. And the software would need to be released for other territories anyway.
I wasn’t following bambu-drama, what’s a good alternative that have equal good quality/precision and won’t require taking a loan to buy?
I understand Snapmaker has been getting some good press lately (especially the Snapmaker U1), and it would be cheaper than the equivalent Prusa and they are more open than Bambu (so far) in their deals with open source.
My only personal experience is with Prusa (and I'm a happy customer). Their machines are also built to be serviable, which matters for print farm style usage, I have heard that a Bambu just doesn't last more than a year or two in that environment. Prusas just keep going as long as you lube the bearings every now and then.
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More than slightly more, certainly when comparing like-for-like, particularly when considering multi-material features.
It's a worse printer too. Not to mention overpriced since it's built in the EU
Externalized costs are real. "Overpriced because it's built in the EU" implicitly argues that there are no fundamental differences between the labor conditions, environmental controls, and societal impact of the production process.
The Chinese tech industry is built upon a foundation of GPL violations. There is no way to stop it beyond getting CBP to block imports, which effectively amounts to shunning.
They built on a foundation of not respecting US intellectual property; copyright licenses were also ignored.
I never used Windows, I never used Apple, I never used Adobe, I made my life harder than I needed to for my ideals... 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…
Any reason why you did not choose a PRusa 3D printer ? From my experience those work well, are mucxh more open & don't do any of the stupid shit Bambu is trying to pull off.
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Yeah - we have 4 printers at the moment, one of them a Prusa MK3S+ & it has been maintenance free so far. 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 av…
> 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! This is why hobby printers continue to be a time sink, while my Bambu just works. It's a tool, I shouldn't have to fix it after each use.
My current machine is a bit of a weirdo. A formerly basic Creality Ender 2 Pro (the cheapest possible small bed model) that I have had for more than four years, which has always been an unusually excellent machine for fine work, and now has a hardened steel nozzle in a faster heating/higher temperature hotend, mesh bed levelling, direct drive extruder, tidier cables (!), Klipper/KlipperScreen, and an even tighter calibration situation.
I am not at all bothered about pushing machine limits, and I am not an electronics or hardware tinkerer at all. Not my mindset. I don't print stuff for the sake of printing, and I'm much more focussed on learning CAD techniques.
The upgrades were done as a systematic plan to teach myself how the basic functions of a typical modern machine work on a much deeper level, so I can teach and help others. (Life plan changes)
And indeed only once I knew I have need of a larger machine anyway — not that I've bought it yet, for life reasons.
It's nice that it's a little faster, prints higher temperature materials better, levels more easily and more precisely, is now super dimensionally accurate, and my modestly-custom Klipper config has let me dabble with support interface layer swaps by smoothing over some of the details of filament changes, which is cool. In many ways it is like having a newer machine.
I still don't feel like a hardware or electronics guy and I'm not a performance tinkerer. The machine is upgraded, prints superbly, and now I just use it when I need to use it.
But what I have internalised is that I should be able to run my printer as long as I want, with what software I want, understand it and fix it if I need to. I absolutely don't want to tinker for the sake of it, but I also don't want to cross fingers and rely on a machine being great from the factory. If fixing it means changing it, that's fine with me.
If you are intending to print things for which quality and precision matters, then there is no substitute for understanding the machine more deeply, and that means a machine that will let you understand it.
This new understanding is really challenging my choice of what I buy for my workshop, because to some extent this window of deeper understanding is closing. There are, by contrast, many "off the shelf" machines that compete with (and outperform) Bambu machines at comparable and lower prices.