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Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

jeffgeerling.com

331–340 of 452 posts

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#331
post #324
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…

Isn't this just a Bambu marketing point? I have a Prusa MK4S and a Centauri Carbon - they both print without any fuss and can be operated without any deep technical understanding.

Im not sure what problems people are even envisioning having. I got a diy Anet8 that was badly assembled by somebody else years ago that they gave to me for free. I tightened up some fittings and strapped down some loose wires and it still just works. If newer and supposedly better printers were more difficult I would consider them junk, in operation they aren't that complicated of machines. The most complicated thing I gotta do is usually change the print temp up or down 5 degrees for different company filaments.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#332
> Louis Rossmann posted a video saying he'd pledge $10,000 to help the open source dev fight Bambu's legal threats. And I'd happily chip in too, but that's only useful if the dev wants to put himself back in Bambu's crosshairs.

Louis Rossmann has decided to put himself in the crosshairs instead, with a video goading Bambu: https://youtu.be/1jhRqgHxEP8?si=BwfoCKxujd0XwNJ0

Here's what I don't get. How is infra load any different between someone using their slicer build, and someone using their code in another slicer (or a fork)? It's still (ultimately) the same human making the same requests. If they can't handle the load then the solution is to obviously carefully manage the supply of the printers, if your infra is incapable of handling more than 3 users (accurate figure going by the tone of their blog post), then don't have more than 3 of your printers in the wild at any single time. Problem solved.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#333
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…

I think the Bambu social contract is pretty clear: - they benefit from open source software work - we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3. My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us int…

I just finished building a Core One+. It has a number of printed parts, but it also does have a bunch of injection molded ones, and they've just replaced another printed one with injection molding. Most of it is metal though, with the printed parts mostly used as relatively simple brackets to hold stuff in place that doesn't need great precision, and replacing those probably wouldn't save much on cost. I think these days they do the printed parts thing mostly to dogfood their print farm solution and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation had only one or two printed parts for bragging rights. I wasn't a big fan of that either, the Mini I got in 2000 had a few critical parts printed and that did impact performance somewhat, but the Core One+ is fine in that regard.

From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.

That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.

I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#334

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

Yeah i got a CC1 due to price alone (Prusa was out of my range but obviously vastly preferred), and then they started trying to pull bullshit with firmware. They backed off after outrage, but don't forget that this is exactly what Bambu initially tried to do - so it will be the first and last Elegoo that I purchase.

Printer is great though. I've never used a Bambu, but after a thorough round of Orca calibration this (at the time) newbie was able to get some really decent PCTG and even PA-CF prints.

Web interface can't hold a stable video stream.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#335

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.”

It can talk to the printer directly if you use "LAN mode". This also work with 3rd party slicers like OrcaSlicer.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#336
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can use the code however you want but equally they are free to bar anyone they wish from accessing their servers. These are completely orthogonal issues in a legal sense.

They can bar people from accessing their servers if they do so by rewriting the entire slicer to be closed source and then implementing some actual security, instead of literally giving you the means of access AND the permission to use and modify it as you wish.

If I give you a template for a postcard, it doesn’t give you the right to send it with “signed, ricardobeat” at the end. These are orthogonal concerns.

They could very well enforce login for the entire app, that doesn’t require any closed source code and everyone would be worse off.

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#337
post #133

Funny how fast people forget. LAN mode was NOT part of their original plan until outrage like this happened last time. They shifted their course and changed their blog post after. Putting pressure as a customer is how you steer company’s direction.

Also, LAN mode is NOT a substitute for the functionality you bought the printer with. My biggest annoyance is that I can no longer use OrcaSlicer to interact with my printers (e.g. sync filaments) and start prints remotely. I am still very annoyed at Bambu Labs for this stupid move, as it directly impacts my usage. What most people seem to be missing in these discussions is that some of us have printers in remote wor…

Why do you feel entitled to use their cloud services with 3rd party applications?

Re: Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

#338
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can use the code however you want but equally they are free to bar anyone they wish from accessing their servers. These are completely orthogonal issues in a legal sense.

They can bar people from accessing their servers if they do so by rewriting the entire slicer to be closed source and then implementing some actual security, instead of literally giving you the means of access AND the permission to use and modify it as you wish.

The part of the slicer connecting to their cloud IS closed source.
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