GoKawiilis a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Bambu Lab makes the best, most accessible 3D printers yet, but that reputation is suddenly under siege. It all started when Paweł Jarczak received a private message from the company on Reddit asking him to delete his code. Now the 3D printing community is lining up behind Jarczak to fund a war against Bambu — and the future of 3D printers could be at stake.
Jarczak is a developer who shared a way to let people remote control their Bambu printers without using Bambu software. But Bambu wanted to lock down its system, despite relying on open-source code. That provoked a furious coalition of open-source advocates and YouTubers to respond.
“I’ll put up $10,000 to teach bambu labs a lesson,” declared consumer rights advocate Louis Rossmann, pledging to help defend Jarczak in court.
“I’m never buying a Bambu Lab 3D printer again,” stated maker Jeff Geerling, adding that he’d gladly chip in too. (He’s changed the YouTube title since.)
“Go fuck yourself, Bambu,” wrote GamersNexus, pledging to commit $10,000 as well. (It’s also halting previously unannounced plans to buy $150,000 of Bambu hardware for a 3D printing project, editor-in-chief Steve Burke tells The Verge.)
“Go ahead, Bambu: Sue us,” taunts GamersNexus, which has also begun investigating scattered reports of a Bambu printer catching fire.
If that wasn’t enough, Rossmann, Burke, and thousands of other open-source advocates are daring Bambu to take legal action — they’re each forking the code Bambu was hoping to suppress. As of Monday, so is the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is now hosting an entire project to reverse engineer Bambu’s code and says it will serve as a Bambu watchdog.
“They’re bad actors, straight-up, and the community should do whatever we can,” Bradley Kühn, father of the AGPL open-source license and policy fellow at the Software Freedom Conservancy, tells The Verge.
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