[kayson]

I'm supportive of Jeff's general philosophy towards open source, but this feels a little disingenuous. Did Bambu mishandle the situation? Absolutely. But we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service. It's easy and convenient. The slicer is still open source, and you can still use their printers without the cloud. (Yes there was some fighting after their security issue in 2025, but they did put in an effort to maintain compatibility with third party slicers even if it was misguided and/or out of touch.

Bambu has every right to restrict or limit how their cloud service is used, even if they do it in a completely insecure and trivially reproducible way (a user agent).

I'm curious from a legal perspective - the user agent in the Bambu slicer is AGPLed, so copyright wise it seems anyone could put it in their own slicer too. Nonetheless, something feels wrong to me about saying you're a Bambu slicer when you're actually not. Bambu is going after it because of the user agreement, but is there any other legal standing for complaint?

[airport_barfly]

I think it's more disingenuous to call "trying to ruin a guy's life" "mishandling the situation". Also

* user agent spoofing has been common practice on the web for decades * Bambu's customers were bait and switched here. They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.

Imagine if you bought a car with Carplay/Android Auto. A year later, the manufacturer pushes an OTA update that locks Carplay behind a subscription. But they have terrible security, just trusting the car itself to say if it has a subscription, so you use use pirate software to bypass the restriction and get free Carplay.

This is a far more financially damaging outcome for the car manufacturer, closer to stealing than user agent impersonation, but I would still argue that its morally justified. Consumers should have a right to fight rug-pulls, especially a physical product. This behavior from companies would never have been acceptable before the internet.

[kayson]

> trying to ruin a guy's life

They asked him to remove it and threatened to send a cease and desist. They didnt even send the cease and desist, which they very well could have. Hardly an accurate characterization.

> They bought a printer that works locally, and Bambu wants to remove features from the product they paid for. And it's the _customer_ who's actually running this slicer and impersonating Bambu.

This just isn't true. You can still run it locally and still use third party slicers locally.

[xp84]

> being cloud-first. The reality is that 99% of their users set up the printer and app using the cloud service

Part of me thinks that the particular kind of enshittification we've come to see with devices, where something that certainly needs no cloud has a hard cloud dependency baked in, is partly an accident of the networking environment everything has grown up in.

When broadband and then especially Wi-Fi caught on, using NAT was so practical, solving both the "how do we properly configure a firewall to only route good traffic" problem, and the "we don't have enough routable IPs for every smart toaster or baby monitor to get one."

Only after this reality and assumption had been completely baked into every home network and the devices used to build those networks, then we started to see IoT devices, which really benefit from remote access. Companies added cloud because it was the only way to make that work - and most of them didn't want to implement and support a different protocol for LAN usage when that wouldn't sell any more devices.

I wonder if we had started out with ipv6 before the wi-fi boom happened, and every device had a routable address, and wi-fi routers always had good firewalls, and UPNP had not launched with immediate security issues... I wonder if we would have seen much more direct connectivity enabled by companies who given the choice, would rather sell a device that didn't need anything from them to support, instead of a device they're obligated to run servers for (at least for a few years).

[inetknght]

> we need to stop vilifying companies for being cloud-first.

No. Absolutely not. Cloud-first is privacy-second, and rental model with ever-changing fees and terms of use.

[kayson]

> Cloud-first is privacy-second

This is not necessarily true. There are technical solutions to preserve privacy, end to end encryption being a very common one. That being said, Bambu strikes me as a very competent 3D printer designer, but not so much a competent software designer.

> rental model

I don't think this really applies to a hardware company selling 3D printers. You can always still use SFTP or SD cards to print. A big selling point for them is the ecosystem and being able to, for example, find a model on the app while you're on the road, send it to your printer, and have it be done by the time you get home. If this weren't cloud enabled, most of their customers wouldn't be able to get it to work because things like VPN or tailscale are well beyond them.