[oliwarner]

> This isn't actually possible

This is only true due to a firmware they pushed last year. It's an artificial limit.

There's no reason at all a local client couldn't just talk to a local printer without any cloud.

Every problem BambuLabs have here is self-inflicted. They could allow simultaneous cloud and local queue management with or without authentication.

[Perseids]

All of their issues are self-inflicted. What benefit is there to their cloud backend except getting around the home NAT? If you want to build your IoT product privacy-friendly, your cloud offering can be reduced to a STUN/rendezvous server and a proxy server as fallback [1]. Ship your devices with individual tokens to rate limit the proxy, have the STUN/rendezvous/proxy server address configurable and publish their source code for users to not be dependent on your continuous operation.

You can even go so far and have a public sub domain for each devices ( serialnumber.manufacturer.com ) which you only operate as a dumb proxy so that even the TLS certificates are negotiated end-to-end between the IoT device and Let's Encrypt. (The devices connect to your backend via Wireguard and you rate limit with their device individual key, whose public key you read out during the end-of-line production step.)

Hell, with today's browser heavy applications you can even run the whole slicer in the browser. Let the app be distributed via CDN so the code does not need to go through the proxy.

[1] In the case of non-battery operated and always or mostly on devices, like 3d printers at least.

[odo1242]

Honestly, a lot of devices that use cloud apps for things could be improved both for the customer and manufacturer by using a "STUN/TURN" style proxy for the cloud service rather than forcing all data to go through a cloud service (to add to the other advantages, you don't need as many developers on the cloud side). But nobody in the engineering departments of these companies seem to be willing to touch WebRTC with a nine-foot pole lol

[anakaine]

I dont understand what the issue is. Theres not really any benefit in having cloud enabled if local is working fine. I have my bambu printer set to local only, and dont miss the cloud offer one bit.

[xattt]

There abusing the AGPL. At this point, it’s on principle.

[vfvthunter]

Please explain how they are abusing the AGPL

[wat10000]

They threatened legal action against the author of a fork of their AGPL'd software merely for distributing said fork.

[vfvthunter]

That they are. However, that's abusing the developer, not the AGPL.

[wat10000]

I disagree. They’re redistributing software under the AGPL while trying to prevent others from using the same freedoms they’ve been granted by the license.

[oliwarner]

Proprietary plugins in [A]GPL software are always contentious. It's the old linking argument and it's especially strong here, given how useless Bambu Studio is without the networking plugin.

[_flux]

I imagine some (many?) people just enjoy accessing their printer over the mobile phone without setting up VPN, even if said mobile phone isn't on the home wifi.

[oliwarner]

This is a distraction though.

There's no reason I couldn't access through the cloud on my phone and from Orca locally without any cloud. The spool management is on the physical printer. I don't need Orca to use their cloud; it just needs to chat to the printer.