‘Fuck you, Bambu’: How one private message could change the face of 3D printing

is 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. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. 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. But why is everyone so mad that Bambu’s printers don’t work perfectly with third-party apps? Are Bambu’s actions really that egregious, or is it just trying to protect its ecosystem? I spoke to Bambu, Jarczak, lawyers, and others to understand. Both Bambu and Jarczak shared copies of their private communications for this story with The Verge, each eager to set the record straight on what actually happened. This is the story of how everything went wrong, and how it could become right again. What is actually going on with Bambu and Paweł Jarczak? On April 22nd, when Bambu first reached out to Jarczak in a Reddit private message, its tone seemed polite. Bambu suggested it was warning Jarczak of upcoming changes that could prevent his code from working. The first DM concludes: “we kindly ask you to consider removing the current connection approach, as it mimics official Bambu Lab software.” Jarczak replied that he was ready to remove his entire project from GitHub and thanked the company for noticing his work. But he wanted to be “properly acknowledged” for possibly revealing “a significant security gap.” He offered further help for a fix while requesting some gear — specifically the flagship H2D printer. But Bambu was not ready to reward or recognize him for promoting ways to use unauthorized third-party software and hardware that competes with its own. (Jarczak’s previous project was supporting a cheaper way to print in multiple colors than buying Bambu’s $279 AMS Lite, a project he’s since suggested Bambu should also recognize him for.) Ominously, Bambu started talking to Jarczak like a mobster: “We wanted to speak with you first and handle this in a constructive way. That said, we can’t allow this approach to continue.” Jarczak bristled. He had publicly voiced some suspicion that what he’d done had crossed a line. But he also knew that Bambu’s code was open-source under AGPL, a license so permissive that Google famously banned its engineers from using it at all. The developer wanted to know: What, specifically, had he done wrong if the code was open-source? Above: The actual communications between Bambu and Paweł Jarczak. Instead of explaining, Bambu ramped up its threat. It told Jarczak that a cease and desist letter had already been prepared, and “invited” him to look at section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, implying it could legally punish him for breaking digital locks. But Bambu didn’t sue. It didn’t send a cease and desist letter. It didn’t even send a DMCA takedown to remove his files from GitHub. Jarczak voluntarily took his code down. But in that code’s place, Jarczak left a note suggesting that Bambu treated him like a criminal. That’s when the internet pounced. Why is the open-source 3D printing community so upset? Because Bambu’s software is not just Bambu’s software. “Bambu Studio is based on PrusaSlic