The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of Bambu Lab’s 3D printer slicing software. But on Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shut down the project “following legal threats from Bambu Lab.” information Tom Hardware:
Jarczak’s fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bambu Connect, a middleware application that severely limits OrcaSlicer’s access to remote printer functions in the name of security. Jarczak said in a note on GitHub that Bambu Lab threatened him with a cease and desist letter and accused him of reverse engineering his software to impersonate Bambu Studio.
Bambu Studio is an open source project under the AGPL-3.0 license. Anyone can take its code, modify it and distribute it… That’s what OrcaSlicer does, and so do 734 other forks. We don’t have a problem with that and never have. At the same time, a code license is not a pass to our cloud infrastructure… Our cloud is a private service. Access to it is governed by a user agreement, not the AGPL license… [T]The modification in question worked by injecting forged identity metadata into network communication. In simple terms: it pretended to be the official Bambu Studio client when communicating with our servers… If this method were widely adopted or misconfigured, thousands of clients could simultaneously access our servers posing as the official client.
“User-Agent is not authentication” counters OrcaSlicer developer. “It’s just self-declared client metadata. Any program can configure any user agent.” And “the User-Agent construct comes directly from Bambu Lab’s own public AGPL Bambu Studio code… So on what basis can anyone claim that I cannot use this specific piece of AGPL licensed code under the AGPL license…? My work was based on the publicly available Bambu Studio source code along with my own integration layer.”
But the bottom line is that Bambu Lab “contacted me directly and demanded removal of the fix.”
I asked if I could publish the private correspondence in its entirety for greater transparency. That request was rejected… They also referred to legal materials and stated that a cease and desist letter had been prepared…
I deleted the repository voluntarily. That removal should not be interpreted as an admission that all legal or technical accusations leveled against the project were correct. I removed it because I have no interest in having a protracted dispute over this particular implementation, nor any interest in continuing to distribute it.
YouTuber and right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann reviewed Bambu Lab’s correspondence and then promised $10,000 in legal fees if the developer returned its code online. (“I think their legal claim is nonsense,” Rossman said Saturday in a YouTube video for his 2.5 million subscribers. “I’m not a lawyer, but I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is.”)
The video now has over 129,000 views so far. “Rossman has not started a crowdfunding site yet.” Tom Hardware grades“claiming in the comments that he wants to show Jarczak that he has followers willing to put their money where their mouth is. The video has had over 129,000 views so far, and commenters have promised to back the case as requested.”
