Bambu appear to be doing what many before have done - uncut the competition making a loss if necessary to grab market share then ‘add options’ and up the price.
Thank you Jeff!
Personally like much of what MakerWorld have copied from Printables (and other sites before them), and like much of the new features they’ve added. I see monthly creator subscriptions options, and Kickstarter features even. The IP flagging seems to be in good faith support of designers.
Curious if anyone here is actively designing and selling designs/parts for profit, and not just fun, is happy with their experience on MakerWorld or Printables?
Only from Prusa though.
Sorry, thought you were US. 
https://makerworld.com/en/models/1659044-lr4-core
https://makerworld.com/en/models/1688164-bcg-ace#profileId-1789190
These don’t appear to have any attribution so I wouldn’t be too confident of that last part.
That’s not to say printables or thingiverse are any better.
1 Like
110%. In my youth I was a staunch Android fanboy and would bad mouth apple every chance I could (I started on the OG Droid and had it running custom firmware, enabled WiFi hotspot, over clocked the CPU, etc). As an adult I’m just like… my time is limited and valuable, so my highest priority is to have a thing do the thing it’s supposed to do reliably. Made the switch to iOS in 2019 (after 10 years hardcore android) and you couldn’t pay me to use an android now lol. Not here to bash either platform, just giving my perspective on why I’m OK giving Bambu my money; it works and it works well, and if you use the same platform as everyone else, things tend to be easier for you (less time spent figuring shit out) and hey, I at least bought it in person at MicroCenter!
I don’t think this is true… my A1 came with two allen wrenches, the only tools needed to take it apart 
it even came with an extra belt for when this one wears out. It’s seriously just the same generic internal parts everyone else uses AFAIK.
Also Apple stuff has always been repairable. The iPhone 4 and 4S, for example, were held together with two screws exposed at the bottom of the phone. Everyone and their mom had a custom backplate back in the day. Hell, I just checked on my 16 Pro and it has the same two screws! You can also repair just about anything on a MacBook Pro, you just can’t add RAM/SSD. Replacement parts are expensive but that’s only for Apple certified parts, you can use cheap generic screens and you’ll just lose the ability to use FaceID, but your device will be fixed. Also Apple Care is cheap for what it is, I can smash my MacBook with a hammer and pay a deductible to get a brand new one, no questions asked (once per year).
Good luck finding replacement parts for whatever thousands of model variations of Thinkpad laptops or Samsung phones out there… again I’m just spitting facts as a lifelong computer/tech nerd to correct misinformation, I’m NOT trying to argue by any means All that being said, stuff doesn’t just break on its own… I still use my Thinkpad Yoga 2013 from grad school whenever I need a portable windows machine or I’ll bust out the steam deck for some Linux tomfoolery
Yeah I mean I can’t think of any feasible way for any company/website to verify every uploaded file is valid and legal…(well, other than how Apple handles their App Store I realized after typing this lol). I bet if you and enough people hit the “file a complaint” button, something would be done about it… at least that’s what I’ve heard from reading things online, and I’ve seen comments on MW related to self policing which is also encouraging.
it’s one thing that was proposed I think when makerbot/3d systems was in the ascendant - a replacement stl format that was more like pdf- it could be watermarked and possibly prevent modification. In an open source environment it never got any traction.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, as I don’t have, and likely never will have either a Prusa or Bambu printer for various reasons.
However, I have some opinions based on things I’ve read before
I think part of this is what rubs people the wrong way. Prusa spent a bit of time developing Printables, including contests, etc. and all the things you see on MakerWorld. The overwhelming opinion of most people, given the time it took them to do it, is that BambuLabs scraped and direct copied much of the site from Prusa, and basically re-skinned it. There are claims online, of which I don’t know the validity, that there was proof of this in the JS and CSS.
Bambu, of course, denies it.
Printables was not a novel idea, but it did fill a need as Thingiverse was abandoned and slow, and Printables was not a direct copy and offered many improvements over Thingiverse.
Makerworld, in its infancy, offered nothing extra over Printables, and seemed to be a blatant re-skinning.
I believe this is where a lot of the hate came from.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, as long as the methods are ethical. If Bambu is not doing things on the up and up, then it’s not ok.
If they really did hire a ton of people and invest millions in developing all of their site, firmware, etc all from scratch in such a short time frame, then yes, I also see no problem with it
My understanding is that Bambu firmware is fully closed source. There is a page here that lists open source software, but I think many people thought in the beginning that their firmware was based on Klipper or Marlin, and that they were breaking licenses by using it and not disclosing their changes.
I’ve found mixed things online about this, so I won’t speculate on the truth, but I think that was teh perception for a while. That they were utilizing open source, GPL stuff, and not abiding by the terms.
I feel like I remember in teh beginning, even BambuStudio was not properly attributing PrusaSlicer, and the public git repositories were often out of date and did not match the current version of the released software. I don’t know the state of it today.
I think Bambu gets hate because people expected them to operate more like Sovol has with the SV08. They took the Voron 2.4, commercialized it, made it a package of convenience and sell it witihout having to do any R&D and saving all that cost up front…… but they acknowledge and donate back.
As of 7 months ago, Sovol had donated at least $4,000 back to the Voron team. I won’t debate whether “we” think that’s “enough” or not
@ClineDesigns I wasn’t intending to call you out personally or anything lol, but many of the sub-ideas in this thread happen to reach an end in your posts
I did not do an exhaustive search, but I onyl see the original i3 firmware on the Prusa github. Is that the only firmware they have across all of their products?
Are any of the others also based on Marlin and/or Klipper?
If so, I would hope that they are published somewhere as well….
If not based on Marlin or Klipper, are they also custom written firmware that is fully closed source?
I have no idea, just wondering if anyone knows where they stand as far as firmware goes and whether it’s all open, even if the board designs themselves are not.
I’ll raise my hand and say that I am one of them. Given the state of prices today, it’s very hard to sit on my high horse and ignore that I can get the same things I want at half the price.
Do I contribute to the problem? yes
If I stop contributing to the problem alone, will it go away? no
There are probably many ways to stop it, but relying on consumers to voluntarily pay higher prices on the basis morals is almost never going to work lol
To help combat all the Bambu hate, I have just purchased a Qidi Q2. Qidi appears to be trying to do to Bambu, what Bambu did to everyone else. Undercut prices while keeping a comparable or better product
For everyone not willing to buy a Prusa over a Bambu over cost, I was able to purchase a printer comparable to a P1S with AMS, for ~30% cheaper.
The Q2 has a bigger bed than the P1S and some features on it that I like better, most notably, the one where I paid $250 less
Did Qidi take some notes and “learn” from Bambu in a similar vein as Bambu did to Prusa? Maybe… but I guess I would say…. they started it, and now it’s probably a race to bottom, price-wise.
My “greedy consumer” mode wouldn’t let me pass up that deal.
And I was pretty sure I would NEVER own a commercial 3D printer like that….
5 Likes
Sellout. 
4 Likes
For those who don’t think there’s a compromise position between commercial reality and open source (software) here’s another throwaway line from Josef Prusa - teaser pics in the link -
C’mon you know us BTW a big @PrusaSlicer feature is about to drop, and I can’t wait to see which direction Orca will take it. It will be fun to push the 3D printing quality forward together
1 Like
For those who don’t know, SoftFever is the main developer for OrcaSlicer
Edited for Peter’s note below, and it was kinda confusing the way it read…
5 Likes
Just note the quote above is from Josef Prusa, not from @bitingmidge (PeterH)
1 Like
It was a little confusing… I replaced the text with a screenshot of his tweet for real context
2 Likes
And here is the PR from the OrcaSlicer feature mentioned.
I still quite like PrusaSlicer more than OrcaSlicer for a lot of reasons, but I followed some of the Orca development and this “igiannakas” guy makes some very thorough and high quality PRs.
His before/after pictures on some of his other features he’s implemented are pretty impressive
2 Likes
Thanks for that! The message that I like none the less is that there are actually still companies who are collaborating and building on each other’s work in the original spirit.
1 Like
Yes, I just wish they would team up and stop duplicating all of the effort. A lot more things would get done if every feature didn’t have to get implemented twice lol.
They are both following each other and implementing features from the other… and neither of them have all of the things from the other. They both lag behind in one area or another.
For us consumers, less options here, I think, would be better.
We currently have 3-4 PrusaSlicer forks being maintained, I think
2 Likes
Yeah, agree, too many dupes seems like wasted effort (considering everyone’s time), and slows overall progress. But… On the plus side, I feel like a few open source options results in some competition/pressure/exploration that helps prevent gating/throttling of progress that can happen if there’s just a single monopoly deciding on direction and rate of progress.
1 Like
Harder to play the benevolent victim role if you pool your resources, too.
I kinda agree, but…
PrusaSlicer
BambuStudio
OrcaSlicer
QidiStudio
Orca-Flashforge
These are just the ones I actually know about…
It makes sense with Cura, etc. since they are completely different, but these companies taking and re-skinning and forking from there…
I know it’s hard because Prusa has not always been very responsive about feature additions and it can be frustrating sometimes, and Orca has the benefit that they can roll things out faster…
so I don’t know if there is a good solution, but it just feels wasted that every time Orca slicer comes out with a new feature, the PrusaSlicer github and all others get flooded with messages asking for the same thing, and vice-versa.
And since Orca Slicer unfortunately started as a BambuStudio fork, instead of direct from PrusaSlicer, there’s a bunch of stuff that is hard to merge/re-implement because BambuStudio ripped out a bunch of stuff that was useful. So over time, OrcaSlicer devs have slowly re-implemented some of them but people are still begging for some of the features to come back, like this one
I looked a bit at trying to implement a PR for this newer “Actual Speed” feature in OrcaSlicer, and the code in that area was wildly different, where it didn’t look like it really needed to be
2 Likes
It has gotten way better. If we continue this metaphor, you say apple is bambu, prusa is android. But your version of android is more like a oneplus with a custom rom. That is a kit or hobby printer. Something like a creality with custom firmware. Prusa is better compared to a pixel phone. It is polished, “just works”, but it doesn’t try to force you into an ecosystem that only works with apple. Prusa and pixel also have better open source compatability than apple or bambu. You could not pay me to take an iphone over my pixel. But I also am not interested in hacking a phone I use so for so much of my day.
I don’t agree that bambu is better than prusa. I just haven’t seen that in real life. Both a prusa and bambu can print very reliably on the same models. The bambu looks more like an hp inkjet printer. But I don’t think it is any more reliable or higher quality.
Bambu came in an stood on the shoulders of giants, in the open source community. Their printers, the mechanics, the firmware, the website, the slicer, and probably even the production line was only possible because of the work of other companies. That’s pretty business as usual and I wouldn’t care normally. But when you rip off open source companies, you are ripping off the public. That bothers me.
3 Likes