Bambu Lab, a company once celebrated for its high-quality and user-friendly 3D printers, has recently hit a trifecta of questionable behaviour: enshittification of their products, threatening legal action to silence critics and violation of free software licences. Fortunately, several organisations have stepped in to fight for customer rights and free software. Among those, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) is asking for volunteers and donations to help fight Bambu’s corporate overreach.
Enshittification
The situation has been brewing for a while. In January 2025, Bambu Lab started limiting what software could talk to their printers. Hardware would stop working, simply because the manufacturer wanted to dictate how customers should use their own devices.1 Only after backlash did the company backtrack on some of the changes. This episode led some users — e.g. Jeff Geerling and Louis Rossmann — to stop recommending Bambu’s printers.
Bullying
In April 2026 Bambu Lab threatened legal action against a developer who had forked OrcaSlicer to increase interoperability of Bambu printers. OrcaSlicer is a fork of Bambu Studio, which might seem to give Bambu some standing, except Bambu Studio itself is a fork of Prusa Slicer which is a fork of Slic3r and all that code is distributed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) which allows forks.What Bambu did was an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). Technically no litigation happened, but the mechanism is the same: Bambu used high costs of legal defence to threaten the livelihood of a free software developer who exercised his rights. This kind of intimidation allows the rich to break the law with impunity, bully others into submission and silence criticism.2
AGPL violation
The irony is that Bambu is violating the AGPL, which is a strong copyleft licence. Without going into details, any code linked with covered software must be provided under the same licence terms. Meanwhile, Bambu Studio includes a binary-only networking module violating that requirement — something Leonard French described as ‘a textbook violation’.
What can we do?
Not all hope is lost. Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) decided to step in by a) creating the baltobu project based on code that Bambu threatened over3; b) pledging to continue monitoring Bambu Lab violations;4 and c) organising a committee to discuss and protect rights in the 3D printer community. To achieve all that, SFC is calling for support:
Contribute code
First, you can contribute to the baltobu project which aims to create fully open-source software for Bambu printers by reimplement features hidden inside the aforementioned binary-only module. This will allow consumers to use their hardware the way they want without having to bend to the wishes of a corporation.
Donate to SFC
Second, to help coordinate the work and fund potential legal actions, SFC asks for donations. At the time of writing, they are nearly halfway to their goal.
Ultimately, corporate overreach only succeeds when users accept it as the new normal. Whether you can contribute code to baltobu, donate to the SFC or simply tell a friend, taking a stand is how we protect our rights. Fighting large companies may seem helpless, but change is possible if we don’t get intimidated.1 This is reminiscent of the Other OS lawsuit against Sony. PlayStation 3 had an ‘Install Other OS’ option which was removed through a firmware update (thus removing an advertised feature). Eventually, Sony agreed to pay millions to settle the case. ↩
2 For a slightly humorous take, the subject has been covered by John Oliver. ↩
3 To share full credit, I was first made aware of the story through Louis Rossmann and GamersNexus (GN) who each decided to call Bambu’s bluff and host the source code the company had issues with. See FULU Foundation’s article and GN’s article. ↩
4 As the quote goes: ‘eternal vigilance is the price we pay for liberty.' ↩