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Cannot agree more with Josef on how dangerous this is for our intellectual property; Of course there laws and mechanisms in China for the government to obtain any information retained by their companies under any possible justification, but the US does so, and thanks to the Cloud Act they can simply decide to do the same with any of the big players sitting in their territory (even to servers located out of their territory).
So, taking into account >80% of European companies rely either on Amazon, Microsoft or Google to store all their most private and business sensitive data, is this any different from all the data we are possibly leaking already? Same with AI, same with the phones and payment systems we use on a daily basis...
Sometimes I just have the impression that this has nothing to do with protecting our intellectual property but rather with finding an enemy and focus on that while pretending everything else is fine... and a blogpost from the owner of Prusa Research talking about their main competitor is a good demonstration of that.
What's frustrating is that Prusa isn't too far removed from how Bambu works today. Prusa-Link (the onboard firmware) allows you to do very basic job control but has essentially zero machine control and very little telemetry. All the major functionality is behind their PrusaConnect cloud service, which they've now added a paid tier to, and which they've been promising for years to open source in order to allow print farms to run offline.
I love Prusa printers and all my machines are Prusa, but they really do need to get their software situation sorted because in it's current form, it's somewhat hard to distinguish from the operational reality of Bambu - if I want to use all the features on my XL, I need to send my files to Czechia first.
> pretending everything else is fine
No one pretends that everything else is fine.
It is in my opinion reasonable to call out any violations of any law or any violations of the users' or companies' privacy as they are spotted. And everyone is best suited to spot issues in areas or fields in which they operate.
Your cloud act is making American cloud vendors lose customers in droves
I use my printer to make prototypes for my business. There is no way in hell I'm sending them into the internet for some random to examine.
I think my next printer will be mostly 3D printed, with a few generic parts like motor controllers, the odd bit of metal tubing, off the shelf bed levelling system, open source software etc.
I only need single colour prints for work, and AFAIK the fastest printer on the planet is mostly 3D printed, I'd start with that one as a base and adapt it for my needs. I considered Bambu until they started down the road that ends with me not having control of the product I own. Any company on that path does not get my money.
> There is no way in hell I'm sending them into the internet for some random to examine.
I think it’s funny how much this battle has been contorted since it started.
This fight started because someone added Bambu Cloud support back into OrcaSlicer because it’s what users wanted.
These are the first 3 lines of Louis Rossman’s fork’s README:
> This version of OrcaSlicer restores full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers.
> You are not limited to LAN only.
> It works over the internet just like before, through BambuNetwork, with full functionality for normal use and printing.
Yet reading all of the comments on HN you would be left with the impression that Bambu was fighting to force everyone to use their cloud service.
> I think my next printer will be mostly 3D printed
What you're looking for then is a Voron. They're the printers that Bambu was "inspired" by and are made with all off-the-shelf parts.
I really enjoyed building my Voron 2.4. I bought a kit that included all the wires pre-harnessed which made it much simpler to do.
You certainly can design or build it yourself, but you don't have to.
There's an absolute fuckton of new, offline 3D printers for sale in the world. If disconnected operation is the goal, then finding a disconnected printer to buy is a simple affair. Lots of them just take regular gcode (as produced by Orca Slicer or similar) from an SD card or over USB, and don't have built-in networking as a feature at all.
If having it run open-source firmware is also a goal, then that's fine too: Research it first to ensure that its stock controller board can be flashed with custom-built Marlin (for complete airgap) and/or Klipper (which tends to imply LAN-only connectivity).
Being able to run open firmware is more common than it is unusual.
It's a pretty basic research task to drill down and then pick one with the price/performance/community/support characteristics that you want. After that, just assemble the machine when it shows up, and then build Marlin or Klipper for it.
And people in the 3D printing community will help with all aspects of this process, regardless of how you set your own goals. :)
There are options, albeit chinese, that don’t phone home. I have a qidi q2 that’s an awesome printer, and runs open firmware (klipper+fluid) and is pretty much a voron with closed-source hardware, or an x1c with open software. I’m told flashforge printers, the current new hotness because of its multi-nozzle printing, are pretty much open as well.
a voron thats whats you want. massive community, build kits out there, fully open source
Going from Bambu to a self printed 3d printer I don't even think counts as the same category of devices. Bambu is concentrated on making a plug and play device that just works.
Seems like an overreaction. Licensing aside it is trivial to use a Bambu completely air gapped. If someone uses AI at all but cares about this I hope the irony is not lost on them.
I can't help but wonder how could, Bambulabs or the Chinese government, actually mine that data? In my mind, 3D models fail into two categories: artistic and utilitarian, though there's a continuum between those two. With the artistic side, the Chinese government could find itself in possession of tons and tons of Western miniatures. With the utilitarian side, they will find themselves in possession of lots and lots of random parts with no way to know what they are for. Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...
I think you are underestimating how many companies use 3D printing for prototyping. It's not just hobbyists printing miniatures.
To give an example, I had RSI and use a high-end, expensive ergonomic keyboard. The company that makes these keyboards does not go immediately from design idea to an expensive mold. There are many design iterations and prototypes and they are all 3D prints.
The same is probably true for air humidifiers, drones, or whatever other object you can come up with.
If you have access to everyone's STLs, you basically have access to all the design prototypes and something close to the final product.
It's like industrial espionage, except companies are willingly giving you the data, because they do not want to spend the extra money for a farm of Prusa printers.
It's a brilliant play of the Chinese government. Exploiting that we prefer short-term savings over long-term strategy.
This pattern repeats over and over again, from 3D printers to people buying Chinese fitness watches because they are cheaper than EU and US counterparts.
Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government.
The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.
The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China.
After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it.
So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit.
In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction.
It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch.
They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.
This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment.
She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.
In every Bambu thread lately the assumption is that these battles are about regaining local access, but this whole battle started over trying to get Bambu Network cloud access back into OrcaSlicer.
This is the first three lines of the FULU fork of OrcaSlicer from Louis Rossmann:
> This version of OrcaSlicer restores full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers.
> You are not limited to LAN only.
> It works over the internet just like before, through BambuNetwork, with full functionality for normal use and printing.
Reading the comment sections are confusing because so many people without Bambu printers have assumed the battle is going the other way, with users fighting to not use Bambu’s cloud servers.
Your comment is close to getting to the root of why the arguments are getting weird: The Chinese government isn’t interested in scooping up all of the trinkets being printed. Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing. The users fighting for this wanted to go back to sending their prints through the cloud for convenience.
I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be:
- Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it.
- Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through.
It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.
This is an issue for me and my company.
I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines over Bambu because of the potential for losing critical proprietary IP with Bambu. Can't take the chance.
There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats
> Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...
Custom firmware is always a thing for these printers.
At a grand minimum, they can still your wifi password and intrude your network from the street any day they want.
It's become rather clear that Open source licenses are vulnerable, since defending them costs large amount of money, and proving violations can be hard since by definition the products that break them are closed-source.
Software Freedom Conservancy is at least fighting back.
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-p...
Open source for medium and small projects is dead if enforcement is a consideration. Trivial to reimplement in same or other language and give yourself plausible deniability.
Can I just say: thank you for posting an xcancel link and not linking to X directly! I forgot Xcancel was a thing, I might actually start using it occasionally now.
I noticed that xcancel links are rewritten to x.com more often than not, probably due to the fact that xcancel will not last like xitter, nitter and all the ones before it.
I hope that archive services implement preserving twitter content.
There is an open source web browser proxy thing called finicky [0]. I use at work that lets me redirect urls clicked in other apps like slack to specific browers (firefox / chrome) or even specific chrome profiles. It'll also allow you to rewrite the urls.
Its pretty widely used on HN from what I notice.
I'm surprised xcancel even works. I thought all the nitter servers had shut down.
3D printing is still very much an enthusiast, techie driver market. The degree to which Bambu has done their best to alienate that market is beyond astonishing.
I really like Bambu's machines. Their quality and prices are both excellent. But they no longer have an edge feature and speed wise. I can get pretty much the same product from Creality, so why would I even entertain a user-hostile company like Bambu?
With DeepSeek making their price rebates permanent we now have some data what China values data access at.
Western providers of the open weight models are 3 times or more as expensive as DeepSeek itself right now.
Of course the data access for the Chinese is not the only part valued in there, but I am pretty sure it is one.
How is there no enforcement paths?
If Josef really wants to go after BambuLab over AGPL violations he can do what the music/movie industries did: have them blocked at the ISP level.
Cease and desist for all servers outside China. Block traffic at ISP levels.
Unlike various pirate websites there won't be a hundred copy cats to also hunt down.
Can you just sue them over it? Sure they are a Chinese company but they also operate in Europe and US?
I would like some precedents, to see if AGPL is actually enforceable. Many licenses put several demands on user, but are some parts are void and illegal. Like OEM licenses for MS Windows, that forbit reselling.
License can not order someone to publish something. They may not have a rights to publish code, or it was created as part of employment...
Surprise: another day of mechanical engineers not really understanding what open source really means.
I mean this as general advice; never trust software released/written/shared by mechanical/robotics engineers, especially ones from China. There's something deep-seated in their psychology where they ignore coding standards and can't conceptualize and obey software licenses.
> The standard defense for something like this is "the plugin is a separate work, so it's not subject to copyleft." That argument falls apart on contact with the actual software. BS cannot do its primary job without the plugin. The plugin cannot do anything without BS.
But that's just not true? You can connect a printer in LAN/dev mode and print directly from slicer to printer. There are apparently some issues with more complex network setups but that seems to be the exception rather than the rule.
I think the concerns he has generally are valid, but I have yet to see something from a legal perspective (e.g. precedent) that convinces me this constitutes a license violation. Would love to see one.
I sure hope none of Ukrainian shops use Bambu Cloud printers to do their drone manufacturing.
Too bad the Software freedom conservency and FSF dont have harsh punitive measures they push. Else theyd demand a pound of CEO flesh, or push the US gov to ban all imports and sales.
Instead, its negotiation and laughable settlements.
As someone who does work with FLOSS, if I violated their copyright/patent, theyd extract pounfs of flesh from me. Tit for tat.
Im done with nice. I want blood from corporations who wrong us.
Its a chinese company. They don't give a single flying fuck. Nor do almost all consumers as long as the product is good. And no western government is gonna care because we let ourselves become so dependent on cheap chinese manufacturing.
Where is the lawyer involvement? Why has no TRO been filed to prevent Bambu from selling in the US? This is a problem with a legal solution, yet we collectively just wring our hands and wish for a technological solution.
Am I the only one who read this and contemplated that it would be entirely straightforward for a Chinese AI inference provider to efficiently scan their input and output token streams to identify cryptographic keys, access tokens and interesting vulnerabilities?
(And, frankly, for Western providers to do similar things. Even major players like OpenAI have terms that really should not be seen as commercially acceptable unless you manage to negotiate ZDR.)
Kind of love the irony of this being an xcancel link
I don't like all this shaming on social media. It feels performative and leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
If they're in violation of your copyright agreements, sue them. If you can't sue them because it's unenforceable, well, that sucks, but too bad.
I don't know what they expect to happen here. Is there even a clear call to action? Boycott? Do something.
This post is now gone. Click the down button and stop reading.
It seems we have arrived at the "HN does not read license texts" hour again.