Independent software developer Pawel Jarczak has voluntarily shuttered his popular “OrcaSlicer-BambuLab” project following legal threats from Bambu Lab, ending one man’s fight to restore direct control to the popular third-party slicer. 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 its software in order to impersonate Bambu Studio. He said he was also accused of violating Bambu’s Terms of Use and bypassing authorization control. He chose to voluntarily remove the software. He insists he did nothing wrong as his fork of Orca only used publicly available source code.

“I explicitly pointed out that, according to Bambu Lab's own explanation, the reason the method still worked was simply that they had not disabled that path yet. In other words, the behavior they objected to was, by their own description, still possible within the Linux-side workflow they had not yet changed,” Jarczak wrote.

Article continues below

He also pointed out that Bambu Studio is publicly released under the AGPL-3.0 license, a “copyleft” Open Source license that PrusaSlicer uses. As Bambu Studio uses PrusaSlicer’s code as its foundation, it must allow the core program to remain open source.

For many, brand-agnostic Orca Slicer was THE gold standard of 3D printing slicers. It’s a fork of Bambu Studio (which is itself a fork of Prusa Slicer), developed by SoftFever in 2022 when Bambu Lab was a young company with only one printer line, the X1, to its name. Because Orca was community-driven, it was quick to develop wild new features and offer them to users to test before they were fully stable and corporate-approved. Things like scarf seams, crosshatch infill, mouse ears, and a built-in suite of calibrations were introduced by Orca Slicer first.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.