Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

It's "I would like to take this free software so I don't have to write it, oh and by the way I want to make everyone dependent on me now for enshittification reasons, so kindly fuck off and let me use this software just by myself. I take, you no take. Understand?"

Part of me thinks that the particular kind of enshittification we've come to see with devices, where something that certainly needs no cloud has a hard cloud dependency baked in, is partly an accident of the networking environment everything has grown up in.

When broadband and then especially Wi-Fi caught on, using NAT was so practical, solving both the "how do we properly configure a firewall to only route good traffic" problem, and the "we don't have enough routable IPs for every smart toaster or baby monitor to get one."

Only after this reality and assumption had been completely baked into every home network and the devices used to build those networks, then we started to see IoT devices, which really benefit from remote access. Companies added cloud because it was the only way to make that work - and most of them didn't want to implement and support a different protocol for LAN usage when that wouldn't sell any more devices.

I wonder if we had started out with ipv6 before the wi-fi boom happened, and every device had a routable address, and wi-fi routers always had good firewalls, and UPNP had not launched with immediate security issues... I wonder if we would have seen much more direct connectivity enabled by companies who given the choice, would rather sell a device that didn't need anything from them to support, instead of a device they're obligated to run servers for (at least for a few years).

If you can afford to pay more for less printer, get a Prusa Core One. I almost did, but at the time the cost would have included four months of waiting, and that was just too much.

But the Qidi Plus 4 has been just a beast for me. It had some growing pains, and the Internet is forever, so if you read up on it you'll see some scary-looking problems involving the heating element which have been completely fixed for more than a year. From everything I've been able to determine, the QC issues with the Plus 4 are over, and the newer printers like the Q2 and Max 4 have never had them.

I think the intersection of "reads HN" and "needs that tiny delta of convenience between Bambu and Qidi" is empty, basically. Qidi are good open source citizens, and you get a lot of bang for your buck, especially handling high-temp filaments. It's _possible_ to print nylon and ABS on Bambu hardware, but realistically you want something a little better.

Also they're cheaper than Bambu. Thought that was worth mentioning as well.

I'd seriously consider the Snapmaker U1 also, but not the K2 Plus. For one thing, Creality has had to be bullied several times to meet GPL obligations, and I don't like to reward that kind of behavior. For another, the Qidi Max4 is bigger, prints hotter, is more precise, and costs less. Pareto improvement on the K2 Plus.

I'm holding out on the Snapmaker because a) my Qidi Plus 4 is a great piece of hardware and at only 700 hours it's got a lot of life left in it, and b) The Prusa + Bondtech INDX is right around the corner. That's probably going to be my next printer. I find the waste and extreme slowness of AMS-style multimaterial too distasteful to invest in, and I think that entire paradigm will end up in the dustbin as tool-changing consumer FDM matures.

The first year was rough, from what I've read. Mine arrived March 2025, it has taken no work to print excellently, and at about 700 hours I have lubricated it every 200 hours, and I just tightened the belts about 50 hours ago. That's it. If it's less than $100 a roll I've probably printed it. I have no complaints.