Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract

To me, this looks like state pressure rather than a normal business decision. I cannot see a convincing reason for it otherwise. If these printers are used in professional settings, users may be unknowingly sending prototypes, designs, and internal project data to China. That kind of access would be extremely valuable, especially if the company can identify the buyer, their location, and their field of work. Given the relationship between Chinese companies and the Chinese state, corporate espionage seems like the most plausible explanation.

> Some people are okay with using OrcaSlicer and printing through Bambu's cloud. It's convenient if you're on the road and want to start a print on your printer at home

Do such people really exist? Are there actually people who are comfortable blindly starting a robot in their home, with a part that heats to 150 C, and then hope that everything will work out and when they get home the part will be waiting for them, instead of the firefighters?

Hacker News - the place where shills love to make reasonable sounding arguments.

I wish I could better articulate the rage I feel that is accumulating strand by strand, year by year, for the corporate over-lording, abusive, user-hostile, person-hostile practices that are rapidly normalizing across the modern capitalist playbook. I have no outlet. The pressure just builds.

Calling out bad behavior out to get any group of people to change is dead. Nobody with any bit of power gives a fuck any more. It's really, really bad. Give as little power away as you possibly can. "Open Source" has to be end-to-end to work at all. Even a tiny bit of proprietary spice will eventually spoil the entire dish.

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I own a H2C and have been a huge fan of bambu for a few years, full disclosure.

I don't really see why everyone is up in arms about this. You are able to print in LAN mode or directly through USB drives without going through bambus servers.

Their slicer is open source but it downloads a plugin once you launch it if you choose to which is closed sourced that interacts with their APIs.

Someone reverse engineered the plug-in and put it into orca slicer and then claimed that the plugin should have been GPLed to begin with which I find dubious. I don't really see it being much different than downloading closed drivers on Ubuntu but I'm also not a open source lawyer.

To me, the problem with all of this is that it seems strange to want the plugin when bambu will just shut off their resources to unsigned versions of the network plugin if the orca slicer dev got their way.

I'm open to being convinced but I just don't think the cross-section of people who want this would actually want prints going through bambus cloud so this effort really feels vain.

It also feels like bad framing as well because every post I see about this thing really tries to blur the line and claim this plugin and orca slicer are one and the same.

Bambu Lab has made plenty of mistakes, but I don't think this is one of them. And I'm a big supporter of open-source software.

Their cloud infrastructure obviously has real costs associate with running it, and I don't understand why any software other than their own should be entitled to use those resources.

If you buy something and then significantly modify it, you generally tend to void the warranty - and that's not because companies are just greedy; there are real limitations when it comes to a company's ability to support the endless ways a product could be modified.

Publishing something as open-source does not imply that you must operate an optional-but-complementary service at a loss for charity.

> I'm one of those crazy ones who likes to own something they purchased, and not have the company watch everything I do with hardware I paid for.

What phone and laptop does Jeff use?