Growing Concerns About Bambu Lab’s Direction, An Open Letter

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Here’s an interesting thought that just crossed my mind.

Okay, with Blender, the back bone of it being an amazing contender is the addons, the scripts, the plugins. Most of these are sold via gumroad and the blender market place. Blender is a GPL v2+ license, so, all of those paid for addons are pretty much in violation of the licensing terms. :thinking:

There’s one addon for UV packing that I always thought was a little odd, but makes way more sense now. The actual tool portion was a separate binary. I mean, it’s not that odd, it makes it easier to allow different applications to call upon the tool, but for something like that, ehh. But against the backdrop of the GPL v2 license, it does better to insulate their tool from the Blender code, and makes sense.

I read too though that adoption within the industry was slow because of the GPL license. Apparently they implemented a Python based API to help get around that issue. I’m not as familiar, and only read in passing, but it makes sense. Most developers I’ve worked with, they are very tightly integrated into the tools. Like Japanese tentacles levels of integration. I usually cover my eyes.

I’ve always thought Maya was an inferior program, but it opens up the backend to developers fully, so as a studio you can completely customize it for your operation. I think this is one of the biggest reasons it has won out over other applications. I’ve worked with clients where you can barely recognize it’s Maya under there.

I’ll tell you what though. I’ve been using 3D Studio Max since R2, released in 1997 I think it was. So about 28-29 years.For the past 20ish years my license has come from my job, and it wasn’t until I left that industry that I lost access to 3dsmax, and I’m not entirely interested in getting a subscription going (my focus in life has changed). So, 28ish years of work that I can’t access anymore unless I pay Autodesk. 28 years of being a user, and no love left for me unless I shell out more money.

I enjoy with Blender that I can essentially create a “snapshot” of my application setup at a given time. Something I could never do with 3dsmax. Licensing is such an issue with applications like that. Most of us in the media industry have come across a point where licenses we purchased years ago are meaningless now. One of my best friends, a lot of his early design work is locked behind old Quark files. He purchased the licenses for it, but that doesn’t actually help him now.

I stopped purchasing licenses for 3dsmax plugins because of how often new updates would break them, and it’d take awhile before the devs would get an updated version out, if they ever decided to.

I still pay for Adobe and Fusion though, so :man_shrugging: There’s reasons behind it, and for me they are valid reasons, but those reasons may not apply to others. We’re very fortunate to have Blender (it replaced 3dsmax for me, and part of why I don’t intend to subscribe to 3dsmax further). FreeCAD does look decent. Affinity and Resolve may be closed source, but they fill out the gaps on that side too.

One of the biggest issues in the media space has always been access, being able to access the tools. Like how can you learn this stuff when a seat might cost 16k?! It may not be perfect now, but there’s a lot more access than there use to be.

Stuff like Autodesk Flame, I have no idea how you’d learn independently. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, you’d be spending 100k+ to get into it. Now resolve does everything it could, but for free.

(and sorry, my ADHD, I saw blender and went off on a side quest of thoughts that have little to do with the main story)

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Careful, or you’re going to have to start drinking chocolate milk because of this thread too… :wink:

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Ad hominem?!? Not again.

:zany_face:

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Simply creating addons and selling them does not constitute a violation of GPLv2. It becomes a violation if the GPLv2 code is not independent.

If Bambulab’s fork makes changes that deeply entangle the networking addon in such a way that it is clearly obvious that the code is there only for that one addon; then it could be argued it is.

Here is what Paweł said: OrcaSlicer-bambulab/bambu_agpl.md at main · jarczakpawel/OrcaSlicer-bambulab · GitHub

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:man_shrugging:

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Bambu is a mixed-message company. On the one hand they make terrific printers at decent prices (relatively speaking). On the other hand, sometimes their business decisions seem aimed more toward paranoid profit grab than customer/welfare and wisdom. Sadly, in today’s world of moral and ethical chaos, there are many people who don’t see a problem with this. “The dollar first” seems to be a widespread viewpoint… putting humans second.

A prime example is selling the soon-to-be-EoL’d X1 series printer right down to the last available unit before announcing the release of a brand new version. This alienated a lot of customers, who cursed Bambu for their “money first” attitude. And what is a shame is that they could have accomplished exactly the same thing by being openly transparent with their customers (“A new X-series is coming!”) and offering the existing printer at a discount for those who wanted to snap up a good deal (seriously… they discounted it anyway… so why not be open with customers and give them a “pre-order” choice?) I’m fairly confident their existing stock would have sold out in no time at all.

These types of decisions lose customer trust, customer good-will, and alienate customers. These three things are worth far more than a temporary deposit in the bank– especially when that deposit would have been exactly the same and they could have retained customer good-will. As one very smart A.I. put it, “That is a situation of a typical tech-savvy company making bad human-relations decisions. Just because ‘everyone else does the same’ does not make it ethical or right.” It’s interesting when an A.I. sees an ethical quandary better than a human-based company.

So I have to agree that Bambu needs perhaps to hire a business ethics and PR specialist to help guide their decisions toward a more balanced and ethical viewpoint. “Make the customer happy and the money will flow. Alienate customers… and you lose future sales.” It’s the old “one cookie now or three cookies later” psychology test that they perform on three year olds to see if they have properly matured or not. Bambu has a distance to go in this area. Great company; poor decisions.

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It’s not something that a PR specialist or ethics consultant can effectively address, rather Bambu needs a 180° mentality, character and business model change at C-board level…. which sadly, won’t be happening any time soon, as the path that Bambu seems to have chosen has got nothing really tangent to those real, time proven, business values that have built strong, lasting and reputable organizations over time.

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Give credit where credit is due: we’d probably still be printing slowly and getting mediocre results if Bambu hadn’t shaken up the entire FDM industry. I’ve been printing with FDM machines since 2010, and my 2012 $2,500 U.S.-made MakerGear M2 still sits in the corner of my office as a relic of that era.

After Stratasys’ core FDM patents expired around 2000, a community of tinkerers rebuilt the technology through open-source experimentation. Over the next two decades, that small group grew into a thriving FDM community, helped significantly by affordable printers. But despite the growth, FDM printing remained difficult to set up, slow, and often inconsistent. Progress was incremental until Bambu arrived.

Bambu disrupted the market by delivering affordable printers capable of producing fast, reliable, commercial-quality results out of the box. Just as importantly, they improved the overall user experience in both hardware and software, attracting a new wave of users who wanted to print rather than spend hours tuning and troubleshooting their machines.

Like everyone else in the industry, Bambu built on decades of open-source knowledge and community-driven innovation. At the same time, they made significant improvements of their own.

Should Bambu contribute more to the FDM community? In my opinion, absolutely. Do they owe the community? I don’t think so. Virtually every technology company builds on prior knowledge. Bambu got where it is by identifying major pain points in FDM printing and delivering solutions that a lot of people wanted.

Most importantly, Bambu forced the rest of the industry to raise its game. Today we have faster printers, better software, and more choices than ever before. If someone doesn’t like the direction Bambu is taking, they can now leave the ecosystem and still get comparable results elsewhere. That’s a win for everyone. Competition is healthy; monopolies are not.

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It was timing. Perfect timing for some patents to expire and some open sourced ideas to reach fruition. I said this at the time too. I said all printers would get fast. I also called the shift toward toolchangers.

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Bambu missed the mark on tool changers so badly.

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It is kinda silly, they coulda sold just as many AMS’es [their key profit center] if the vortek system were individually PTFE’d, with an optional AMS at the other end of the hose.

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This is what I have been saying. Most of us would have been fine with this setup. 3% of users wanted more than 5 colors at once.

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Bambu Lab has been on this direction since they came to the scene in 2022. By all acount, it has been a direction that speaks to a lot of users, many of whom are not on this forum.

I typed into Google “Give me a list of major consumer and prosumer 3D printer companies by percentage of market share as of today” and got the following. The numbers cited by AI may not be the full story, but it is undisputed that BL has been enjoying great success. It their direction were wrong, it would not have gained such market share in a short period of time.

The top companies in the consumer and prosumer market by percentage of unit volume/market share:

  • Bambu Lab: (\sim )35 - 40%
    • Focus: Pre-assembled, high-speed CoreXY machines with advanced material-changing systems (AMS).
    • Market Status: Holds a leading position by revenue share in the consumer market. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  • Creality 3D: (\sim )30 - 35%
    • Focus: Entry-level FDM and prosumer multi-color systems (Ender, K series).
    • Market Status: Historical global shipment leader with the largest overall volume of units sold. [1, 2, 3]
  • Anycubic: (\sim )12 - 15%
    • Focus: Accessible budget resin (SLA) and high-speed filament printers (Kobra series).
    • Market Status: Massive global presence, capturing a large segment of entry-level hobbyists. [1, 2]
  • Elegoo: (\sim )7 - 10%
    • Focus: Highly affordable resin printers and large-format FDM machines.
    • Market Status: One of the fastest-growing players in the desktop SLA and budget prosumer markets. [1, 2, 3, 4]
  • Prusa Research: (\sim )5 - 7%
    • Focus: Premium, reliable, open-source hardware (Original Prusa i3 series).
    • Market Status: Widely adopted in prosumer, academic, and industrial prototyping environments. [1]
  • Formlabs: (\sim )3 - 5%
    • Focus: Professional desktop SLA and SLS printers (Form 4 series).
    • Market Status: The dominant brand strictly for professional/engineering prosumer hardware. [1]
  • Others (UltiMaker, FlashForge, Qidi, etc.): (\sim )5 - 8% [1]

Note: Market shares are heavily shifting due to rapid technological shifts in the entry-level multi-color segment. While legacy giants like Creality historically hold unit-volume leads, Bambu Lab has led revenue and global entry-level shipments over the past year. [1, 2, 3, 4]

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Thanks for giving us Google’s reasons for loving Bambu labs.

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Did you make this up? Nobody’s been able to print with more than 5 colors without a huge amount of filament waste until more recently.

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While I agree with your statement that Bambu needs a 180 degree mentality change, this is EXACTLY what business ethics consultants are for: to guide companies making unethical decisions in a more customer-centric direction.

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That’s not a bad thing for all of us, monopolies are bad for everyone. This gave Snapmaker U1 a head start and hopefully they’ll keep it that way.

U1 is a very capable printer, but lacks a bit in software since it’s forking off vanilla Orca. So U1 requires some tinkering while Bambu aims for press print and forget.

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Then my question is, what (and especially who) defines what’s ethical and what’s unethical ?

Cause in my experience, what one consultant defines as being being ethical, another defines it as unethical. It’s a matter not just of perspective, but also of societal, cultural and moral values. And history has demonstrated time and again that companies are playing with morality and ethics matters based on stockholders votes and revenue stream. So, what gives?!?

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You ask the question of the ages, and simply put in perspective, it is a question of “what is right and what is wrong and what are grey areas?” The answer to that will differ from person to person, but in general the answer is: Is what you’re doing harming others either physically, financially or emotionally? Or as one wise man put it: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

If a company’s decisions and policies are designed to only increase profits without concern for the welfare of their customers– they better have a durn good product or those customers will fill their needs elsewhere. (Bambu does have a durn good product– which is probably all that’s saving them after several decisions that most ethics consultants would consider blatantly unethical– such as keeping your customers in the dark and selling the outdated EoL equipment without informing them. Unethical.)

If someone has a conscience, it’s not that difficult to understand the difference between ethical and unethical. If they’ve allowed their conscience to become seared over by making money their driving force, bowing to the whims of stockholders (there have been books written on the negative impact of corporations on society), if their conscience is damaged to the point that they put the $$$ sign ahead of customer welfare… they are going to have difficulty making ethical decisions.

When you asked me “what’s unethical”? I paused a moment in surprise, because to me ethics is a way of life. If someone has to ask that question (I’m not speaking of you personally), perhaps that is the problem.

And yes you are right “history has demonstrated time and again that companies are playing with morality and ethics matters based on stockholders votes and revenue stream. So, what gives?!?” What gives is the stockholder system– a system in which the controlling agencies earn profit without work, make decisions without being part of the solution, and are concerned only with profit. However, this does not relieve the President and decision makers (the BoD) from the responsibility of making decisions that are beneficial for their customers. In the end, the customers are the ones paying the bills. Alienate the customers… and there are always eventual consequences.

So in short: who defines what is ethical and what is unethical? YOU DO. And I do. And Bambu does. The question isn’t who defines it, but whether or not we get the definition right.

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So, this brings us back to the starting point, to the undisputed fact that what’s right for one might not be right (thus wrong) for another, and what’s ethical and moral for the former ain’t necessarily ethical and moral for the latter. When you said you were surprised by my earlier question (what and who defines what’s unethical?), you just unwillingly have proven my point: you viewed my question from your moral and ethical (also cultural and societal) perspective, where morals and ethics are attached to a set of specific and standardised values. However, those values aren’t necessarily the same values that other cultures hold in high regard; there are plenty of countries around the world that find our moral and ethic values opposed to theirs, even seeing these as highly offensive. A simple example, to make a point: what was viewed as moral and ethical in our society 100 or 200 years ago, definitely isn’t viewed as moral and ethical today. Just a brief look through our universal history and it becomes quite obvious. But I digress.
My point being that what we (most of the western world, but not necessarily all of it) see as moral and ethical isn’t necessarily perceived and accepted as such elsewhere. It’s a matter of perception, and that’s quite relative (also, subjective as well).