Right to Repair advocate Louis Rossmann pledges $10,000 in legal fees for OrcaSlicer fork developer Pawel Jarczak, threatened by Bambu Lab cease and desist.
Key Takeaways
Jarczak’s “OrcaSlicer-BambuLab” fork restored direct local control between Bambu printers and OrcaSlicer, bypassing cloud dependency.
Bambu Lab cited ~30 million unauthorized daily requests to its cloud servers as justification for the C&D, blaming third-party integrations.
Rossmann is asking Jarczak to restore the GitHub repo in defiance of the threat, with community crowdfunding as backup.
Bambu Lab previously reversed a plan to eliminate offline access entirely only after public backlash, establishing a pattern of cloud-lock behavior.
Hardware repairability has also been an issue: X1 Carbon shipped with glued parts and non-replaceable carbon rods, partially addressed in H2D and X2D.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters broadly see Bambu’s “30M unauthorized requests” framing as self-inflicted: the company forced cloud connectivity, then complained about cloud load from its own user base.
Technical skepticism surfaced around the fork’s actual behavior – one commenter noted the project may have impersonated Bambu Studio against private cloud APIs, which complicates the legal framing even if the threat is disproportionate.
Community trust in Bambu has collapsed for existing owners, with several describing air-gapped network setups to run old firmware as a workaround.
Notable Comments
@Jabrov: “‘Our cloud services are inundated’ … says company that killed product from working offline and forced it to be connected.”
@sottol: Flags that Bambu has also attempted to patent widely used 3D printing techniques in China, citing an MDPI paper as evidence.
@TurdF3rguson: Disputes the scale claim – argues 30M requests/day is easily handled by a $40/month VPS, undermining Bambu’s infrastructure-risk argument.
