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Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#281

Post by [deleted] »

vitaflo wrote: post #273
bityard wrote: post #163

I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change…

People just want to bitch online about printers not being open enough while they type their comments from their fully closed and locked down phones.

[deleted]

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#282

Post by uberduper »

uberduper wrote: post #274
bityard wrote: post #163

I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change…

Did you install the network connector Orca slicer prompted you to download? It's a closed source blob that runs on your PC which I'm presuming you haven't air-gapped as well.

TBF this was the case prior to the firmware change. It wasn't a bait and switch. It just wasn't obvious to someone buying a printer they thought worked with open source slicers.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#283

Post by nepthar »

Petersipoi wrote: post #247

I don't care if my 3d printer is "open" any more than I care if my refrigerator is "open". I get that for a lot of you it's a hobby that you want a dedicate a lot of time to, upgrading, hacking, etc.. which is great. But for me, I just want something that prints when I need it to print. The fewer minutes per month that I have to spend thinking about or interacting with my 3d printer, while still getting great prints,…

Well, I too, don't have anything against a company selling a "good but not open printer", and I don't care if my fridge is open.

However, I hope you see that the behavior reported by Jeff here is just bad. They are either not understanding open source licenses or are acting in bad faith.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#284

Post by simplyluke »

bityard wrote: post #163

I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change…

I'm in a similar boat to you. I understand the current drama, but for my intended use case (an occasional-use tool sitting on a workbench in my garage) LAN mode has been fine and entirely removed from the drama.

I don't want an open source slicer sending prints through their cloud services, because I don't want their cloud services. The value of being able to check on a print or start it from my phone is near-zero. I shoot it off a laptop in my office and check on it intermittently during the print from that same laptop. This has worked fine to-date on my machine, but the concern is clearly that Bambu's corporate interest is not in that use-case, it's getting as much of the ecosystem in-house as possible. They want to control the model side via markerworld, and have everything flow through the cloud.

One doesn't need to assume bad intent, there's pretty clear financial and UX incentives here that mirror a lot of Apple for example. But I don't think I'm out of line for not wanting to move towards that world under a company with Chinese ownership and in an environment where many western lawmakers are pushing for strict control of what the machines can be used for. It's a lot easier to implement DRM, copyright protections, and restrictions on what can be printed in a cloud-only world than one where open source software is sending gcode to a local printer.

I've got no need or intent to replace my machine, but the next one likely won't be a bambu. They're not the only ones who are now making a machine where it works as a tool and you don't need to have 3d printing be your hobby to be productive with it.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#285

Post by buildfocus »

amiga386 wrote: post #272
pimterry wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can tell, they're just objecting to use of their cloud service. You can fork their software and use it with your own printer just fine, they just don't want you to use it with their cloud service, which its own terms of service for access. I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about wha…

They're objecting to use of their cloud service, and they're also disabling local-only mode thus forcing use of their cloud service, and their software is required to be AGPL (because that's how they themselves received it) so they're required to allow you to clone it and modify it but they just don't want you to. 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 m…

Are they disabling local mode? There's no mention of that here - the post by Bambú actually specifically promotes it.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#286

Post by m4rtink »

bityard wrote: post #163

I'm an open-source advocate (some would say zealot?) but I ended up buying a Bambu P1S a few months back because my research indicated that there were ways use it normally without creating a Bambu account, or using their slicer, or having to send all of your prints through their servers. I don't have my notes in front of me, but I managed to do all of that with hardly any trouble at all. IIRC, you only had to change…

Well you are still supporting a company that is turning out to be objectively more and more evil & need to do crazy stuff that would be insanity for any other 3D printer ("block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry").

That automatically disqualifies Bambulab from my PoV.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#287

Post by LeifCarrotson »

alnwlsn wrote: post #214
kn100 wrote: post #30

Full disclosure: I've never owned a Bambu because I've never loved the idea of a "closed" ecosystem 3D printer, however I have used them, and am very familiar with the 3d printing space beyond Bambu. For anyone considering alternatives: You should know that almost all other 3D printers expect you to know a little more about how they actually work than Bambus. Bambus are as close as you can get to a "just works" type…

If you decide to get a Bambu anyway, let me heartily recommend against an H2D. It did "just work" for a while, but then the print cooling fan went bad. On my home Voron, this would be a 5 minute fix. On the H2D, it is this [0]. You basically have to take the entire toolhead apart, removing the mainboard inside it with no less than 11 very tiny and fragile custom ribbon cables that connect to it, plus 5 more connectio…

> On my home Voron,

You're not the target market for Bambu customers.

This is like complaining that on your dirt track racer it's a trivial process to swap the rear end spur and change final drive ratios. Someone who has their dealership do the oil changes on their leased BMW does not care.

Maybe they should care a little, because the long-term repairability of their BMW or Bambu is going to put a real dent in their resale value. But they're not the ones dealing with tweezers and ZIF connectors and flex PCBs, so it's mostly just not their problem.

3D printers used to be exclusively the domain of people who enjoyed doing all this work themselves, who loved a well-designed machine that was a joy to work with like a Voron. That's no longer the case, Bambu is offering unrepairable black boxes that "just work" for enough time that some people can afford not to think care how it's made.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#288

Post by simplyluke »

Petersipoi wrote: post #247

I don't care if my 3d printer is "open" any more than I care if my refrigerator is "open". I get that for a lot of you it's a hobby that you want a dedicate a lot of time to, upgrading, hacking, etc.. which is great. But for me, I just want something that prints when I need it to print. The fewer minutes per month that I have to spend thinking about or interacting with my 3d printer, while still getting great prints,…

I don't want my refrigerator or my table saw to require a server connection to China either, though.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#290

Post by Draiken »

IDK anything about 3d printing, but is their online service so complicated that people can't create an open source self hosted alternative? If they can already take the LAN version and send spoofed requests to their servers, they can do the same to a new fully open server.

Surely people can check the traffic and build a server to answer similarly, no? Or is this much more than job management?

Maybe this is impossible and I'm talking out of my ass, but for me it seems like a perfect opportunity to completely remove the problematic party from the equation.

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