As far as I can tell, they're just objecting to use of their cloud service. You can fork their software and use it with your own printer just fine, they just don't want you to use it with their cloud service, which its own terms of service for access.

I think it's an odd hill for them to die on, but it's not a totally unreasonable position - the cloud is other people's computers, other people can have rules about what you can do with their computers. Just because a client is open-source, doesn't mean you're allowed to use the server.

If you're using developer mode running everything locally (or remotely over your own VPN, like the author here) then I think this makes zero difference.

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amiga386 4 hours ago | parent [-]

They're objecting to use of their cloud service, and they're also disabling local-only mode thus forcing use of their cloud service, and their software is required to be AGPL (because that's how they themselves received it) so they're required to allow you to clone it and modify it but they just don't want you to.

It's "I would like to take this free software so I don't have to write it, oh and by the way I want to make everyone dependent on me now for enshittification reasons, so kindly fuck off and let me use this software just by myself. I take, you no take. Understand?"

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buildfocus 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Are they disabling local mode? There's no mention of that here - the post by Bambú actually specifically promotes it.

	▲	amiga386 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's already gone. This whole issue kicked off in January 2025: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/qwL63 - your only options were to stay on older firmware (and even then, the T&C's are sketchy, it worries owners there's no guarantee Bambu won't change their mind) or, if you upgrade, you push everything through Bambu's cloud services forevermore, and no backsies. Only a handful of operations can then be done by directly talking to the device, from that point on it only speaks to its real owner, Bambu. Bambu's blog mentions LAN Mode. What they fail to mention is that LAN Mode still requires their cloud service for authentication, i.e. they get to cut you off any time they want. They also removed the ability for third party software to talk directly to the printer, it instead has to go through their closed-source "Bambu Connect" handler running on the same computer, with very limited functionality, and only if Bambu Connect chooses to pass on the message.