Bambu Labs just pulled the HP printer playbook on 3D printing — and the community fought back

When I walked into my first job in 2017 and was handed two 3D printers to fix, they were complex, loud, and expensive machines you wouldn't see in the average tinkerer's house. Today, it's a different story. 3D printers are now sold as consumer-grade products that require almost no assembly, fit on your desk, make no sound, and you go from unboxing to printing in just a handful of steps.

And it's not just printing either. You can ask Claude to design 3D parts for you, making the designing bit accessible too. But some giants in the 3D printing industry are trying to repeat what we saw with our regular printers, and as the market grows, we're seeing 3D printing having its ink-cartridge moment.

The printer industry’s worst habit arrived in 3D printing

How DRM and ecosystem lock-in sparked backlash from makers

In January 2025, Bambu Labs, one of the newest and most popular desktop 3D printer companies around, quietly pushed a firmware update that introduced what the company called an authorization and authentication protection mechanism. The X1 series got it first, with the A and P series updates following shortly afterwards.

The change meant that critical operations like sending a print job over LAN, controlling temperature, performing firmware upgrades, and initiating remote video monitoring now required authorization through Bambu's official software stack. Unofficial software, including OrcaSlicer, which has been embraced by the community and previously worked wonderfully with Bambu hardware, was effectively locked out from these functions.

Bambu's proposed solution was a new piece of middleware software called Bambu Connect. The OrcaSlicer team reviewed, and it thought the old way of manually copying your sliced files onto a microSD card was the better approach, claiming that the integration wouldn't provide meaningful value for OrcaSlicer users. They advised Bambu printer owners not to update their firmware. The backlash was swift and loud, but Bambu held course. By June 2025, the A and P series firmware received the same treatment, finalizing the lockdown across the entire product lineup.

Bambu had pulled an Apple without notifying the community that it was built upon. 3D printing wouldn't have reached the level of popularity you see today if it weren't for people tinkering and sharing their findings. The open-source community built the ecosystem one configuration at a time, and Bambu found itself building walls in what's perhaps one of the most open hardware ecosystems on the planet.

The fight didn't stop at firmware

Why cease-and-desist letters turned a technical dispute into a community issue

Bambu Lab decided to ignore the community backlash, partly because its printers were still selling like hot cakes. But if the firmware update backlash was the warning shot, what happened later set the community on fire.

Developer Pawel Jarczak had built a fork of OrcaSlicer — called OrcaSlicer-BambuLab — that restored the cloud connectivity Bambu's lockdown had stripped away. He worked entirely from Bambu Studio's publicly available AGPL-3.0 licensed source code. He didn't touch the proprietary networking library. He didn't reverse-engineer anything. He just read the code Bambu had legally published under an open-source license and built on top of it.

Bambu Lab's response was a private message via Reddit, followed by the threat of a formal cease-and-desist letter. The company accused Jarczak of impersonating Bambu Studio, bypassing authorization controls, violating their terms of service, and creating security vulnerabilities.

Jarczak published a detailed rebuttal on GitHub, calmly explaining each accusation. Right to Repair activist Louis Rossmann jumped in, offering to cover $10,000 in legal fees if Bambu followed through with the lawsuit. Before long, thousands were publicly daring Bambu to take the matter to court.

Open source comes with obligations

The tension between commercial success and the ecosystem that helped create it

What really turned this from a community spat into a legitimate legal crisis was the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) stepping in. The SFC investigated and confirmed two specific AGPLv3 violations by Bambu Lab. The first: Bambu ships a proprietary networking library called libambu_networking bundled with Bambu Studio across Linux, Windows, and macOS, and has never released its source code — despite the AGPL license explicitly requiring that all code distributed alongside an AGPL-licensed project be released under the same terms.

The second violation was threatening Jarczak and forcing him to remove his fork. This was a clear violation of AGPL's anti-restriction clause, which states that no one can impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted by the license itself.

There's a lot of irony going around here. Bambu Studio itself is a fork of PrusaSlicer, which in turn is a fork of Slic3r, both open-source projects built by the community over the years. Bambu took that free work, built a commercial empire on it, and then attempted to use legal threats to prevent others from doing the same thing to them. That's not how the open-source community works, especially not one that's so dedicated to its projects.

The SFC ended up launching a funded reverse-engineering project called baltobu aimed at replacing Bambu's proprietary networking components entirely, and committed to ongoing scrutiny of the company's license compliance. Bambu ultimately backed down from pursuing Jarczak directly, but the damage to its reputation was already done.

We've seen this story before

Why the parallels to HP, ink cartridges, and vendor lock-in feel uncomfortably familiar

If you're old enough to remember the printer ink wars of the 2000s, this all feels very familiar. HP spent years trying to lock customers into proprietary cartridges through firmware updates, third-party chip blocking, and legal pressure. HP printers are getting AI too, because everything needs AI now, but the playbook is the same: sell the hardware at an attractive price and with the best user experience around, build a captive ecosystem, then monetize control over what the machine is allowed to do.

The 3D printing industry grew precisely because it was open. Marline firmware, Slic3r, OrcaSlicer, Klipper, this entire ecosystem was built by volunteers who shared code freely. Bambu Lab didn't just benefit from that culture; it was built on top of it. Watching the company now argue that its terms of service override the open-source license it used to build its software is the kind of move that erodes trust in ways that are very hard to earn back.

The technology has never been more capable and commercial, and if sales are any indication, Bambu Lab continues to capture new customers to 3D printing at a pace never seen before. But the more passionate and mature audience in the space has been burned and is now extremely skeptical of anything coming out of Bambu's camp, which is a shame considering the otherwise excellent printers they make.