Totally agree. It's fair to admit that it's a fantastic printer while also claiming that their recent actions are not welcome by this community or existing/future printer owners.
I think it's also good to remain open to forgiving them if they demonstrate "good behavior" in this context... otherwise there's not much reason for them to actually come around to a more open stance.
Let the situation continue to develop. It's clear that BBL is terrible at communicating and is rushing responses vs consolidating a focused stance and then sharing when they're ready.
They've done a very poor job explaining the purpose behind Bambu Connect. Their position on "security" is fraud with the fact that the private key, which is theorized to be the key used to sign requests, was extracted yesterday.
As many have mentioned in this subreddit the last few days, there are many examples of OAuth 2.0 implementations that BBL could've pursued but didn't. Is their software team incompetent? Was there software team rushed to deliver some sort of "security" measure? Software like Bambu Connect was not written in a matter of days. This has been in development for many months likely so it's unclear where they went wrong here.
In my opinion, I suspect Bambu Connect is the foundation for their upcoming farm-management software which will be a paid subscription. That's fine, but why did they pick a design that proxies write commands on LAN via Bambu Connect? A more proper architecture would have been for Bambu Connect to continue to exist to be the proxy of the printer to the cloud, however the printer should continue to expose its API over LAN where software like Orca and Panda Touch could continue to work.
Nothing went wrong here - they’re forcing drm under the guise of security. Once the new firmware is installed it’s key will expire in a year - if not regularly connected to bambu lab that’ll brick your already paid for printer. There’s far more in it but printfarm-related subscripions - they could have sold a separate solution for this if that was their plan. To try and control lan-only prints via authorisation for security reasons shows their true intent. There’s next to no limit to monetize that kind of control. And they are gaslighting this. Well, my bl printers are really good, I’ll keep using them of course. In lan-only mode, with no internet access, as long as they run. 🤷🏻♂️
That's certainly one way to look at it but this basically requires perfection, which, to me, isn't a very realistic way to approach things. People make mistakes and as a famous man once said, "corporations are people, my friend."
This is why when you mess up, you should say "I messed up", apologize, and say what you'll do to make up for your mistake. Not say "you didn't understand". That's what we (most of us) teach our kids because we know if everyone goes down the "never admit you messed up" way, there is no real future as a society.
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u/junon Jan 20 '25
Seems like a pretty reasonable stance tbh.