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Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract
(www.jeffgeerling.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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Bambu Lab printers to me are for the people who don't care about tinkering on their printer as a hobby, and just want to print things without fuss. Stay in their Apple-like ecosystem and their cloud environment and you'll be perfectly happy. If you want the printer itself to be the hobby, there are a number of similar spec devices that with some tinkering can work just as well.
Some tinkering. I'm done with that shit. I want to print stuff not mess with the printer to print something. Say what you want but bamboo brought that to the people as the industry was pretty stagnant till they arrived. Sure they are assholes now but they did move the industry forward.
not exactly, a bunch of patents expired and Bambu were the first to take advantage.
Right there with you. Until there's another product just like it, I'm going to stick with the ecosystem. I did the hobby thing tinkering on an Ender 3, now I just want my printer to print the models I make.
What are my options if I don't want the printer itself to be the hobby, and I just want to print without fuss, but I also don't want to deal with all that vertical integration crap?
My Anycubic Kobra 3v2 is really easy to print with. Never had a Bambu and I have had several printers now. By far the easiest to just have print a thing.
Just about any modern printer "just works" these days.
Prusa is fantastic in terms of openness and self-repairability, but it is pretty expensive due to the fact that it's all made in the EU, and not in sweatshops in China.
The Snapmaker U1 is a good alternative if you want something far less expensive, but it's not going to be quite as open and repairable.
You go for a commercial-grade machine and spend thousands, honestly. Imo, none of the other consumer-grade machines really offer that out of the box experience. They all require something, and that something depends on the printer.
Well, the most open you can get is Prusa's machines. Repairable, upgradeable, with great customer service to boot.
Other companies are more open than Bambu but few support the open-source movement like Prusa. Qidi, Elegoo, etc. all have great printers that I can recommend (Q2 and Centauri Carbon are fantastic options based on feature set) but they don't use a very open firmware. They are compatible with OrcaSlicer and aren't as bad as Bambu though.
Prussa has its own issues and are starting to close things down.
Only in the fact that they're restricting commercial repurposing of their IP. They're still just as open in terms of LAN only and using any software you want to interact with your printer directly, without going through their servers.
In terms of home users, they still provide every single part as a 3d model you can print at home.
I'm not sure what any home users would want beyond what they're offering.
You're also giving money to a company that has completely screwed all the people who made 3d printing possible by a culture of open sharing.