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Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

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Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#271

Post by Onavo »

vfvthunter wrote: post #265
basilikum wrote: post #205

It's maddening that quite a few people are jumping to defend Bambu here. Principally if you sell a device with a certain functionality and you later modify that device later to remove that functionality that is called theft. It does not matter the slightest bit whether you break into someone's house to physically alter the device or whether you remotely install a malicious software update to do that. But what's even…

So the C&D was stupid, and so is how their network works apparently. Fundamentally, what Bambu are saying is that they have a right to restrict what software accesses their network. The C&D was allegedly sent to stop distribution of software that was written to access their network in an unauthorized fashion (Allegedly according to their ToS). AGPL covers source code. It does not cover who can access what network wit…

This is essentially the same as Signal. Signal foundation, despite their non-profit status, behaves like for profit entities and refuses to allow 3rd party forks of signal. If you fork and build the signal app, you better host the servers yourselves too.

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#272

Post by emilecantin »

vfvthunter wrote: post #265
basilikum wrote: post #205

It's maddening that quite a few people are jumping to defend Bambu here. Principally if you sell a device with a certain functionality and you later modify that device later to remove that functionality that is called theft. It does not matter the slightest bit whether you break into someone's house to physically alter the device or whether you remotely install a malicious software update to do that. But what's even…

So the C&D was stupid, and so is how their network works apparently. Fundamentally, what Bambu are saying is that they have a right to restrict what software accesses their network. The C&D was allegedly sent to stop distribution of software that was written to access their network in an unauthorized fashion (Allegedly according to their ToS). AGPL covers source code. It does not cover who can access what network wit…

> However according to Bambu, Pawel specifically modified Orca to make it look like BambuStudio

"Specifically modifying" as in "not even touching that part of the code in the fork"...

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#273

Post by Orygin »

InTheArena wrote: post #258
Orygin wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good joke if you think more than 1% of their customer base will care about that. Bambu is not (never has been?) targeting 3D printing hobbyist but everyday people; and for them cost/reliability is more important than running your custom slicer. Until there is a serious competitor that has a polished and cheap printer, Bambu can alienate all of the open source community and still be fine.

How many sales do that 1% drive? They also tend to be the evangelical users / YouTubers / tech bloggers that drive sales for the company. Bambu is following Synology's footsteps here. And just like Synology, they will wake up to press at some point and common wisdom "don't buy Synology, the elite moved off when Green came out and now the rest are leaving too". I own the most expensive Bambu (The H2C) - and even I am…

Indeed these voices will drive some sales away, but unless other options are competitive with Bambu's offer, they still sell some of the best price-performance-reliability ratio printers on the market, and that's really attractive for the average buyer.

Most commenters here will value the openness of Prusa, but most lambda users will have limited budgets that Prusa does not cover. The U1 is a great attempt at taking on BambuLab head front, with interesting features at a reasonable price point.

In the end, a lot of people (including here) are using an iPhone even though it's locked down to a higher degree. Some people like a walled garden, some don't care.

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#274

Post by Aurornis »

basilikum wrote: post #205

It's maddening that quite a few people are jumping to defend Bambu here. Principally if you sell a device with a certain functionality and you later modify that device later to remove that functionality that is called theft. It does not matter the slightest bit whether you break into someone's house to physically alter the device or whether you remotely install a malicious software update to do that. But what's even…

> It's maddening that quite a few people are jumping to defend Bambu here.

I haven’t read each of the hundreds of comments, but I haven’t seen anyone defending Bambu really.

What I have seen is a lot of comments trying to correct all of the bad information, which might look like defending Bambu labs to those who came into this thread not understanding what the problem was. Many of the angry comments think that this is a fork to enable LAN mode or remove a cloud requirement, but this is actually the opposite. It’s code to splice the Bambu cloud code from official Linux slicer into OrcaSlicer, which is a fork of the Bambu slicer.

This is allowed and should be defended. Bambu was wrong to try to threaten it because, as I understand it, this was a matter of merging some of their AGPL code into a fork of their AGPL code. Fair game.

I do think the angry mob of people who don’t own Bambu printers who have jumped on this issue is starting to become their own worst enemy, though. There are a lot of confused Bambu printer owners in this thread trying to understand what’s going on and getting the wrong explanations delivered by people who I would guess have no understanding of the situation other than being brought here by some YouTube videos that didn’t really explain the matter well either. There’s also apparent a foundation getting involved which has a vibecode AI slop website that doesn’t explain anything but it getting shared as an explanation, and this GitHub repo was also uploaded by someone who doesn’t understand git or GitHub because they uploaded a copy of the forked code as a single commit instead of keeping git history or introducing it as a real fork.

I suggest that this repo not be used by anyone because it’s not good practice to run a fork without verifying the provenance and checking the changes, which cannot be done when the repo is nothing more than an upload of a copy of some source with no link to the base repo and no history of changes. There are several other actual copies of the fork on GitHub and linked throughout this thread that would be better sources.

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#275

Post by tootie »

wpm wrote: post #269
vfvthunter wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the C&D was stupid, and so is how their network works apparently. Fundamentally, what Bambu are saying is that they have a right to restrict what software accesses their network. The C&D was allegedly sent to stop distribution of software that was written to access their network in an unauthorized fashion (Allegedly according to their ToS). AGPL covers source code. It does not cover who can access what network wit…

I think the really important part of this is that Pawel modified OrcaSlicer to look like BambuStudio by looking at the AGPL licensed source code of BambuStudio and copying it over. And the function he copied over just set the UserAgent string to some hard coded values also available in the AGPL source code of BambuStudio. He didn't reverse engineer anything. Just went and looked at public code that's free to use for…

Yeah they're argument is based on saying that sniffing a user agent string is illegal reverse engineering. If they get the right 100 year old judge they might even succeed but it feels like a thoroughly lame argument to me.

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#276

Post by Topfi »

joshuaissac wrote: post #223
barnabee wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have no rights to prevent people modifying and using AGPL software however they want. They should have no rights to control how people use hardware they bought. ToS for hardware should simply be unenforceable. People should have full rights to adversarial interoperability, even if it means modifying proprietary software or hardware. It always surprises me when people (on this site particularly) are more interest…

> They have no rights to prevent people modifying and using AGPL software however they want. AGPL software can be used and modified within the limits of what the AGPL permits. People can do that with their Bambu software running on their own hardware. That does not extend to using their proprietary BambuNetwork cloud service (somebody else's computer). The AGPL specifically mentions this scenario in section 6. There…

If I just build the software from their repo without any modifications, getting an identical result to what I can download via their website, would I be allowed to use the service? If not, why not? If yes, what if I made a modification? How much may I change and where was this ever codified? What about using an unmodified, prior version of the source code to build? Why would that not be ok?

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#277

Post by bri3d »

mft_ wrote: post #188
arghwhat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to push prints and use the printer with direct local connection, while simultaneously having remote monitoring and remote printing when cloud/internet works and is available. This is not the case of "wanting to have their cake and eat it too", as there is nothing mutually exclusive about these things. It requires no "emulation" or hacks - having a local API open to query state and push print jobs to the qu…

Thanks for confirming. > Being able to push prints and use the printer with direct local connection, while simultaneously having remote monitoring and remote printing when cloud/internet works and is available. So isn't an obvious approach to just cut Bambu out altogether and just create a FOSS cloud alternative, supporting the remote aspects that the users want to retain? > This is not the case of "wanting to have t…

> So isn't an obvious approach to just cut Bambu out altogether and just create a FOSS cloud alternative, supporting the remote aspects that the users want to retain?

Yes, you can do this with HomeAssistant and other tools.

> Nothing technically mutually exclusive, but isn't this exactly the choice that Bambu is enforcing? Which is crappy corporate enshittification behaviour, but something they can do if they so choose? (I'm not arguing in their favour - just trying to fully clarify the situation.)

Yep. There's an argument that the method they chose (attempted takedown of a repo derived from their plugin) is an AGPL license issue. My guess is that they will switch to a more advanced authentication strategy than "a User-Agent in open source code" and the enshittification on that side will just deepen.

I think people are right to be upset that Bambu initially offered both sides (local MQTT and their cloud) and subsequently made customers choose one or the other, but I've used Bambu printers offline plenty (to the point that I had to do the research to figure out why people were annoyed in the first place) and they still work really well; they didn't really hamstring the Developer mode (for example, you can still use all of the fancy Bambu-y features, like reading filament spool status, accessing the video stream over RTSP, etc.)

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#278

Post by basilikum »

vfvthunter wrote: post #265
basilikum wrote: post #205

It's maddening that quite a few people are jumping to defend Bambu here. Principally if you sell a device with a certain functionality and you later modify that device later to remove that functionality that is called theft. It does not matter the slightest bit whether you break into someone's house to physically alter the device or whether you remotely install a malicious software update to do that. But what's even…

So the C&D was stupid, and so is how their network works apparently. Fundamentally, what Bambu are saying is that they have a right to restrict what software accesses their network. The C&D was allegedly sent to stop distribution of software that was written to access their network in an unauthorized fashion (Allegedly according to their ToS). AGPL covers source code. It does not cover who can access what network wit…

> Thus Bambu - like it or not - have a right to limit what software accesses their cloud. You are still free to do whatever you want with Bambu's AGPL'ed software. But they don't have to let you on their network if they don't want to.

Even if we take this at face value, it is irrelevant to their legal threat. They demanded the author to stop distributing software. So no they do not respect your right to be "free to do whatever you want with Bambu's AGPL'ed software.

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#279

Post by [deleted] »

lobo_tuerto wrote: post #266
basilikum wrote: post #205

It's maddening that quite a few people are jumping to defend Bambu here. Principally if you sell a device with a certain functionality and you later modify that device later to remove that functionality that is called theft. It does not matter the slightest bit whether you break into someone's house to physically alter the device or whether you remotely install a malicious software update to do that. But what's even…

Then maybe this video _explaining_ what this is really about is in order: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2OQpLD9ik From Louis Rossmann himself.

[deleted]

Re: Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

#280

Post by wat10000 »

vfvthunter wrote: post #270
xattt wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There abusing the AGPL. At this point, it’s on principle.

Please explain how they are abusing the AGPL

They threatened legal action against the author of a fork of their AGPL'd software merely for distributing said fork.
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