I’m a little late to this party, but I think it’s really funny how Bambu doesn’t seem to realize that it’s customers are tech literate enough to know what our rights our, Grok how licenses work, and understand how software works.
Keep trying to spin it, guys. Ya’ll out here chanting “We don’t need no water let our printer business burn!”
So, on one hand, yes, China has earned itself a reputation for industrial espionage, and Chinese manufacturers play fast and loose with intellectual property.
Ironically, Bambu Lab is one of the better behaved companies until now. They at least tried to appropriately firewall their proprietary code from the open source project they adopted & adapted, and they have not gone out of their way to make life difficult for OrcaSlicer and the downstream projects used by their competitors. (Excluding the mandatory Bambu Connect nonsense, which I do not approve of. That’s BS. I’ve commented on it before. Not going to revisit it.) They weren’t competent in how they did it, but they tried to do it right. (I think they had bad legal advice, but that’s neither here nor there. They could have saved themselves a world of pain by creating a proper API for their cloud services.)
I think earlier someone mentioned Creality as a problematic company, too. But that ignores the work Naomi Wu did with them to get them to better understand and honor open source culture and license obligations a decade or so back. They’re not perfect, but they’re also not evil.
And any company operating in China is obliged to do what the government tells them to do, and the government itself has very few limitations on it. If the Chinese government wants something from a Chinese individual or company, they get it. I don’t think anyone disputes this.
But saying that Bambu Lab is designed for industrial espionage is a stretch, to me. Yes, it could happen as a side effect, and yes, if you’re doing national security business you should be have the printer offline (true for any manufacturer). But the tone of your posts overall verge on paranoia. It doesn’t make sense to scan tens of millions of print files of fidgets and toys and such that people print in hopes of catching one clever idea (how would you even recognize it at scale?)
I just don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that Bambu Lab exists to steal my “Build-a-Bear” Boot Inserts, my Retaining Clips for Vintage Toolbox Drawers, or my Gridfinity holder for Neiko & Habor Freight digital calipers.
The past few decades have shown plenty of examples of Chinese industrial espionage, but it’s all been highly targeted. Nation state-backed hackers have virtually unlimited resources, but they still come at a cost. The reward has to match the resource investment. And consumer printers? That just doesn’t seem like it’s going to have much reward, and it would take a TON of effort and resources to automate. It just seems… like a waste of time.
And that’s why I’m not worried about Bambu Lab stealing my unpublished designs. It’s just not worth the effort, no matter how clever my hypothetical work is. It would be cheaper to just employ a mechanical engineer.
Earlier in this thread, I cited a maxim: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance, incompetence, or stupidity.
Maybe it makes me an apologist, but I think most of what Bambu has done is adequately explained by those. They might be malicious, but I need more evidence before I find that a compelling explanation.
Pedant alert! Ignore this post if you hate pedantry 
Most of that list is not germane to the topics at hand (privacy, intellectual properly, AGPL, cloud services). Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit are advertisers. Appzi is a survey platform. Smartlook and LuckyOrange are user behavior analysis tools which work on aggregate visitor data. These are (very) basic digital basic marketing tools used to get new customers. None of them are about user-created models and designs.
It was just one example among many, but if you can find a company that doesn’t collect data, then let’s go. That was the point of my comment: There are no companies that don’t collect data.
Do you use any Google products? Microsoft? Apple? They all collect data. Much of this data is used to train AI, which is no secret.
Even GitHub. In fact, GitHub has been used by default for training AI. The code for each slicer has long since been integrated into the AI. Photos, songs, 3D models? All of these have now been integrated into AI, too.
Paweł Jarczak code? Prusa’s code? Bambu’s code? It’s all inside the AI now.
Of course, we should keep an eye on Bambu - there’s no question about that - but, in the grand scheme of things, a few 3D models are the least of our worries. I don’t really understand your comment, given that you actually have a similar opinion?
It’s also worth noting that Bambu has already purchased large AI LLM datasets in the past, so they don’t need to create them from scratch, anyway.
The much bigger question is: What does the future hold once AI has absorbed all the code from GitHub - which it has already done? That’s going to be interesting, because AI couldn’t care less about open source or AGPL.
YouTube just promoted it to me, and it’s a good one:
He has a much less positive view of Bambu than I do – but he backs it up really well. Listen to him, not to me.
100%. Same as written content, the AI companies have all successfully stolen all accessible IP that exists and have escaped being held accountable. They don’t give a parent-intercourser about anyone else’s copyright or licenses.
They got away with it. I hate it, but that ship has sailed.
Maybe, just maybe, Bambu will take its lumps and learn. But… probably not. If you steal on a large enough scale, it ceases being theft and is simply doing business. I think they are counting on that.
Why is that interesting? So computer science students absorbing all of the github code would be different? Are you saying all of their work needs to be open source? What is special about training AI that makes it different than training humans?
Seriously? he made good arguments and valid comparisons for stuff that has been staring us in the face that we mostly didn’t notice.
There is some history with this channel and Bambu. He “accidently” leaked an A1 video before the NDA expired.
Some say…
Hello and welcome to the forum. Congratulations on your first post. I see you’ve already familiarized yourself with the forum features - like how to give a thumbs-down - shortly after creating your new account. 
A human knows the original source and can attribute it correctly. A human knows the licence, e.g. copyleft. An AI cannot identify the original source or the applicable licence. AI don’t give credit. AI don’t give a fu….
That is actually a fair argument that most the AI companies make
Some say his leg gets longer when he sees a pretty girl
Wow, we’re already at post number 999 - who’s going to behit the 1,000? 
Think carefully - this might go down in the history of the Bambu forum. 
Like who exactly are you saying don’t matter?
It seems like a good overview of how Bambu operates. I think there is a cultural element: in China, if you are in power, you can just do whatever and people have to suck it up (unless you in turn ■■■■ off your superiors). I don’t think Bambu are used to dealing with dissent, or even “loyal opposition”.
I did find his descriptions of Apple to be hilariously ill informed. I’ve been following Apple, and buying their products, since the mid 90’s, through the “beleaguered Apple” years, the “iPod is just a fad” years, and the “let’s make the worst keyboard ever” years. And while they usually make incredible products, they are insufferably certain of their own correctness. When Apple are wrong, they double down on it. Three revisions of the butterfly keyboards. Nearly a decade of the poorly designed Touch Bar. “You’re holding it wrong” for antenna design flaws (old but classic).
And Apple is petty as ■■■■. Unless you have a platform the size of the Wall Street Journal or Marques Brownlee or John Gruber, they will blacklist you from ever getting products to review or even email responses. When I was in the Apple products review game, the only time they ever talked to me was when I wrote a review of some AirPort hardware where performance was absolutely abysmal. They reached out, loaned me some new hardware, figured out I had uncovered an edge case, and updated the firmware to fix it. But they only talked to me because I had made them look bad. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That’s just a personal story, though. Look at how Apple responded to the EU’s digital markets act enforcement for a master class in how to execute malicious compliance. Rarely have I seen a company more eagerly dig itself deeper into a hole than that.
Not to mention Steve Jobs’s idiot war with Android in general and Samsung in particular. Yes, it’s ancient history, but it is still present in the culture of the company – they’re control freaks who don’t tolerate dissent.
I love my M4 MacBook Pro. Love my iPhone. Recommend Apple products to most people. But I would never hold them up as a model of openness, transparency, and respectful engagement with the media.
It takes a lot to look petty and vindictive in comparison to Apple. It impresses me that Bambu managed to do it. You have to work hard to be the kind of corporate a**** that Apple can be.
Hooray for common sense! Excellent post. Personally I get really fed up with open source/Linux people constantly interfering in projects. Maybe I’m unlucky, but open source material mostly sucks. The reason? Easy - it’s all ‘free’ and they can muck about to their hearts’ content. They spend all their time in their Neo bedrooms changing stuff that is of no use to the average Joe, rather than spending time on what the customers want - as happens in all companies that are trying to make a living. I was actually in the middle of a promising media player which collapsed because the five people involved couldn’t agree. What a waste of talent.
Bambu have succeeded because ‘it just works’, unlike one manufacturer’s products where you spend all your time trying to get the first layer gap to work. I can speak from experience as I have owned six printers over the years. The X1 stands out from its competition.
The fact of the matter is - if you use open source then clear off and find a manufacturer that offers it. Let the rest of us choose the printers that are the best on the market for ease of use.
May I draw your attention to a post in which I discuss an article about most companies utilizing open source? If it were really that bad, the number wouldn’t be so huge. I believe you when you say you’ve had a bad experience - no question about it - but using that as an argument when almost all companies rely on open source is a bit of a stretch.
Hey, Bambu itself utilizing open source - BambuStudio - and most people love it, except for the hotly debated network plugin.
“Open source software is everywhere today. A 2024 Synopsis report showed that 96% of the commercial code bases they sampled contained open source software, and 77% of the code within those code bases was open source. Similarly, a 2022 Linux Foundation study found that 70-90% of any given software code base is made up of open source components.”
That sounds more like bad planning than an open-source issue. This can happen in any project if you don’t clarify exactly how, where, what, and who beforehand. You agree on things first, and then you get started - not the other way around. Clarify things beforehand, not when you’re already in the middle of the project.
Bambu Lab’s arguments and explanations only make the situation worse. They send a clear signal about the direction the company is heading in: a closed ecosystem where no third party is welcome. No room for improvement through third-party tools or components, and on top of that, pressure is being put on a developer to remove open-source code.
As a MakerWorld user, I will no longer upload any models to the platform. I also won’t be buying any more Bambu Lab printers. Right now, I feel like the printers I own are not truly mine, because I cannot use them the way I want to.
This is a terrible attitude toward the community that helped make Bambu Lab successful.
Bambu isn’t the hype talk now. It’s over lol. Funny hearing about security from them..
It’s so easy to run “npm add & npm install” without even realizing you’re using opensource software. People really have no idea how much of the modern world and technology relies on OSS.
