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Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

jeffgeerling.com

291–300 of 452 posts

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#291

What about Elegoo Centauri Carbon? I've had my eye on this for some time.

I bought one a few months back when it was weirdly cheap (£260 delivered!) and it's been really very solid. I've only had a couple of issues:

1. One of the bed temperature sensors reported a fault, this was a loose connection and took about 10 minutes to open and reseat, which was nice

2. I sometimes get an error in Chinese that blocks a print and requires pressing a continue button on the touchscreen. I've tried translating this and I have no idea what it's on about, so if anyone does know what it is then lemme know. Doesn't cause me much trouble though

Overall I'm really pleased with it - it's pretty much a bargain. Mine has never been connected to the internet and very rarely has print failures (and they're nearly all my fault when I have had them). I've ordered the multi-filament addon which they've just announced, and I was pleased to see them offer that as an upgrade for purchasers of the first model.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because (like every IoT product) Bambu want to sell a product with an easy app-powered workflow, and LAN device discovery and remote-access for home devices from mobile apps is flaky and terrible. I wouldn't be surprised if they're slurping telemetry en route, and it's convenient for them that using their app helps nudge you towards Makerworld (their ecosystem for 3d prints, which is presumably good marketing) but I…

Not to mention the fact that some people think of WiFi and cellular data as "things that give me access to the internet". The understanding of what a private IP address is and why it can't be reached from a cellular connection is just not there. Others want to control their IoT when they're not at home or not in WiFi range (they may not even notice the latter). You can do it with a VPN, or perhaps port forwarding if…

I've tried to download a model from MakerWorld and it told me I need to create an account first. That told me what I needed to know about that service & was not really surprising from Bambulab.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#293
It's by far not the only Chinese 3D printer manufacturer that completely disregards open-source licenses. There's also Anycubic Slicer Next, which is essentially a reskinned OrcaSlicer with additional presets for Anycubic printers, yet you won't find its source code anywhere, not even if you request it via email.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#294

This sentence in Bambu Lab's blog post is wild: > We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users. So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING…

Seems like making the slicer only able to talk to the printer via the cloud was a bad way to do things, where any issue results in “instability felt by all users.”

They also seem to not know their nerdy customers, which means, fun times ahead :)

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's already gone. This whole issue kicked off in January 2025: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/qwL63 - your only options were to stay on older firmware (and even then, the T&C's are sketchy, it worries owners there's no guarantee Bambu won't change their mind) or, if you upgrade, you push everything through Bambu's cloud services forevermore, and no backsies. Only a handful of operations can then be done by directly talking to the device, from that point on it only speaks to its real owner, Bambu.

Bambu's blog mentions LAN Mode. What they fail to mention is that LAN Mode still requires their cloud service for authentication, i.e. they get to cut you off any time they want. They also removed the ability for third party software to talk directly to the printer, it instead has to go through their closed-source "Bambu Connect" handler running on the same computer, with very limited functionality, and only if Bambu Connect chooses to pass on the message.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#296
post #71

I am an outsider on the details of the Bambu software requiring users to go through their servers in China and the closing of their software. Still I suspect it is about spying in wartime, Bambu printers are at the core of the Ukrainian war effort, the main reason even Ukraine is winning since januari 2026. First China prevented Ukraine from using any of the drones that they sold in millions to Russia while exercisin…

In practice Ukrainians have long moved to custom built drones for pretty much everything.

Picking up 3D printers that don't spy on you, modding them or even building custom ones is much easier than designing and building millions of custom drones, so I am sure they solved this long ago.

Like, really - a FDM printer is just a MCU board with a bunch of stepper drivers, a power supply, some frame, motors, thermistors & heating elements.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#297

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…

The printer firmware is proprietary, cannot be easily changed anymore, and does certificate pinning for the cloud functionality. LAN mode does not expose the same functionality as the cloud.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#299

I bought a Bambu Labs A1 Mini. It cost $199, on sale. I plugged it in and started printing excellent prints. Previously I bought an Ender printer for around the same amount. Never did get it to work. I'm not an engineer or a mechanic. I have other technical hobbies, astronomy for example. I tried making a telescope mirror with results similar to the Ender printer. I buy ready made telescopes, not telescope kits. I ha…

Prusa wrote an article about that:

https://www.josefprusa.com/articles/open-hardware-in-3d-prin...

In short, these Chinese companies are pushed by the state, in essentially massive dumping. And not only that, they get Chinese hardware patents granted on open inventions from the wider 3D printing community as their own creation & then try to push those spurious patents also in the West.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in Prusa's OCL stops anyone from cloning and selling their printer. It only stops the honest people from doing that (and possibly much more, like manufacturing and selling replacement parts or mods). Creating 3D models from existing products is relatively fast and easy. The hard parts have always been the actual design process, materials selection, and setting up the supply and manufacturing chain. Prusa took…

What you’ve said is true but also misses the point. Licenses have never been about stopping bad actions because a bit of text can’t prevent someone from buying materials and building things, just like a speed limit sign has never stopped someone from speeding (unless they crash into it). They ARE however deterrents to bad actions from less-than-scrupulous entities, and enforcement mechanisms against fully-unscrupulou…

They really are not deterrents.

Even if the unscrupulous entities cared about the license, they would just get their (already paid for) CAD person to reverse engineer every single necessary model over the course of a week. If an amateur like me can reliably do that in his spare time, imagine what a professional could do during an 8 hour shift.

But it doesn't matter either way because no unscrupulous entity is going to be dumb enough to publicly announce that they used the models to produce their clone.

If I manufacture a clone of a Prusa, there is no way for anyone to prove that I used the original 3D models. If it were possible to prove that, it would also be possible to "prove" that I copied 3D CAD models that I've never seen, which could put me in legal trouble. Reverse engineering is not a crime, and reverse engineering (and all the costs associated with manufacturing and prototyping[0]) likely _can_ reproduce a near identical Prusa printer.

As an aside, if you've seen the average Prusa clone, it's often quite far from the original design. Almost nobody 1:1 cloned Prusas back when that was a thing, because the Prusa design didn't cut corners. Those clones would often use designs which were probably derived from the original, and were unpublished. Why didn't Prusa go after them for this? He should have had just as much luck given that those manufacturers were potentially in breach of the GPL.

In summary, the OCL cannot actually stop clones, because if it did, we'd have some serious problems with our legal systems, prohibiting perfectly legal reverse engineering (irrespective of if the cloners did the reverse engineering or not).

It _only_ stops people who are honest enough to state that their designs are derived from Prusa's models. People who weren't a threat to begin with, and who now are voluntarily subscribing to legal issues if they ever felt like selling a Prusa modification without Prusa's approval.

The real deterrents are:

* Design complexity

* Extreme amounts of competition (almost nobody would buy a prusa clone these days unless they _wanted_ to have an almost broken printer to force them to learn how to make it work reliably). We have cheap, good, first party 3D printer designs.

[0]: To clarify, when I say prototyping, this needs to happen irrespective of if you reverse engineer or not. Once you have the models, which will be true to life, you still have to "reverse engineer" the tools/dies/materials/etc, for which Prusa sensibly does _not_ offer the models.

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