Fuck You, Bambu Lab: OrcaSlicer-BambuLab Download (with permission)

The Basics

While we work on our full piece, here's what you need to know about the situation.

The developer, Pawel Jarczak, posted on GitHub to say that Bambu Lab accused him of reverse engineering their software and impersonated Bambu Lab:

“In that statement, Bambu Lab described the modification as something that: (1) injected ‘falsified identity metadata’, (2) ‘pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client’, (3) ‘crosses into impersonation’, (4) was ‘bypassing a technical limitation’, (5) could create infrastructure problems comparable to service overload caused by unauthorized traffic. These are very serious public accusations. Bambu Lab did not write to me with these specific public claims first. They also refused my request to publish the full correspondence. Instead, they published a one-sided public statement where I cannot reply directly. In practice, this presents me to the public as someone bypassing security, impersonating their client, and creating a risk to their infrastructure. I reject that characterization.” - Pawel, developer of OrcaSlicer-BambuLab

From everything we’ve seen, Pawel’s code is a legal third-party tool that is covered under open source software licensing, and in no way has he “impersonated” Bambu Labs or presented as them at any point.

We’re not lawyers, but you don’t have to take our word for it.

Copyright attorney and YouTuber Leonard French, who is a lawyer and who also covered our Bloomberg situation, jumped in with his own commentary:

"The picture, then, looks like this: Bambu sends a Cease & Desist letter to a developer over an open source project, while a legal mechanism is quietly taking shape that would allow any of Bambu's own customers to walk into California State court and demand the corresponding source code for their entire closed networking ecosystem. But you have to zoom out, because the conflict between Bambu and OrcaSlicer is not an isolated event: It is a textbook manifestation of what Right to Repair advocates have started calling 'progressive enclosure,' the strategy by which manufacturers across every sector use software locks to convert one-time hardware sales into ongoing monetizable services. Bambu's enclosure timeline tracks the pattern almost perfectly."

In the piece, he goes on to describe a situation that, to us, sounds favorable for the developer and not Bambu.

Friend of GN Louis Rossmann also jumped in with a bounty:

"I saw Pawel was kind enough to give me an idea of what was going on [...] what I'm going to be doing here is pledging $10,000 for the legal fees that he would have to pay if he keeps up his code and Bambu Labs goes after him. If Bambu Labs goes after you for keeping up your code, I am so confident in your case that I will pay the first $10,000."

And we’d like to do the same. If Bambu Labs pursues Pawel for his code, which from what our research suggests is completely within legal bounds, we will also contribute $10,000 to Pawel’s defense against Bambu Labs and would be happy to connect Pawel with our US-based IP attorneys that we used to successfully fight Bloomberg. We'd also be fine putting it towards offense against Bambu.

Louis is pursuing this from the angle of fighting Code 1201 of US copyright law and the DMCA, which is the “circumvention of copyright protection systems” code. Bambu appears to be trying to leverage this section of copyright law, which carries with it aggressive penalties and possible federal prison time as a maximum criminal penalty. 

Frustrations for GN, too

We’ve seen some of the communications behind the scenes and it looks like Bambu is trying to claim circumvention of copyright protection systems. Louis is also going to be hosting the OrcaSlicer-BambuLab from Pawel with his permission, so it will still be available even though Pawel isn’t currently hosting it for legal reasons. Speaking with me, Louis said Bambu can sue him if they don’t like it. We will be doing the same. If Bambu doesn’t like it, they can add us to their list of lawsuits or I’d be happy to meet them in Shenzhen.

This whole thing is frustrating, because Bambu’s printers are actually good.

Late last year, we had just bought our first 3D printers and decided to join the scene. We’re consumers here -- we’re not reviewers of 3D printers, so like you all, we deferred to reviews and researched our purchases. We chose Bambu Lab H2S machines, which we used in our Noctua 3D printed fan content. 

We’ve been happy with the quality of the prints, but the company is reminding us of NVIDIA: The product quality is good, but the company is run by assholes. As a result of Bambu’s recent actions, we’ve begun conversations with Prusa instead and have already ordered $5,000 of Prusa equipment to start experimenting. We want to make 3D printing a long-term part of GN, but unlike NVIDIA, there are a lot of alternatives to 3D printers that aren’t made by assholes, and we’d rather buy into those ecosystems to support companies that are more open rather than be part of the marketshare capture that a Bambu’s actions are enabling.

It’s unfortunate, as we do really like the printers and the quality. We already own them, so we’ll use the ones we have until we phase them out as we evaluate Prusa; however, going forward, we’re already looking to move onto Prusa instead. Hopefully they stay clean. We chose Prusa by recommendation of Wendell, and in talks with Prusa, the company is far more open.

We’ll have more on Bambu Lab on the GNCA channel soon.

In the meantime, grab your Slicer above.

Go fuck yourself, Bambu.