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.
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.
Bambu Studio is closed-sourced at the Networking Plugin, which is the critical component that allows Bambu printers to phone home and access the company’s cloud servers.
Jarczak also maintains firmware for the Bambu Multi-Color Unit (BMCU), a DIY alternative to Bambu’s AMS. He said there is a growing risk that the BMCU will also be locked out of Bambu Lab’s ecosystem and is pivoting to Klipper-based printers. He is currently crowdfunding that project through Ko-Fi and Revolut, with links on his Git Hub page.
Bambu Lab had customer security in mind back when it labeled third-party integrations as a risk to its infrastructure in January 2025. The company reported that its cloud servers were inundated with roughly 30 million “unauthorized” requests per day, threatening system stability. The main culprit? Orca Slicer is an open source and independently maintained third-party slicer.
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.
It was a death blow to Orca users when Bambu Lab removed direct access to its cloud servers. Unlike other printers, Bambu Lab machines rely on cloud access to support their advanced features like remote monitoring and reading the filament in the AMS. In fact, it wouldn’t be until three months later, in March 2025, that a Bambu Lab printer would have a USB drive to facilitate moving print files without the internet. The X1, P1, and A1 series were all limited to hard-to-access microSD cards not intended for frequent access.
Though Bambu Lab offered up “Bambu Connect” to allow OrcaSlicer to send files, it severely limited users’ access to their own machines. OrcaSlicer could “see” your printer’s and AMS’s settings, but could not change anything. Changing the speed, temperature, or colors in the AMS required users to manually input data directly into the printer.
