alt Hacker NewsIt's been pretty weird and disappointing to see the way Bambu has taken over with these practices.
If you go on social media where people are talking about 3D printing, a lot of folks are not developers and don't know anything about software licensing. It is hard to explain this problem to them, or why anyone should care. Meanwhile for many of these people, Bambu is totally synonymous with 3D printing.
Prusa has attracted its own valid criticisms, but I think they are closer to being right on these issues. They can't compete with Bambu on price.
Replies
Haven't these (A)GPL violations been there for most of the company's history? It's the context around them that changed.
While the ecosystem was open few people cared about the network plugin, and apart from that plugin the Bambu Studio slicer is open source. Similarly there was little interest in calling out the suspected violation of their online slicer - it's probably just a headless variant of Bambu Studio. But when Bambu started closing their ecosystem and claiming that user agent headers are DRM everyone got justifiably upset, and this is a just outlet for that
It's a shame because the Bambu product line is genuinely first class. They don't need to play these games to compete, and could have won a lot of genuine good will by giving a little back to the community.
Bambu and Prusa are both engaged in harm.
But Prusa is only engaged in self-harm.