How I understood it, simplified: Bambu Labs will only let you print if you send your files through their cloud service (Bambu Connect). If you use a third party slicer, it will be severely limited in functionality, making you reliant on Bambu’s own slicer. This slicer is a fork of the open source Prusa slicer, and the Bambu slicer was later forked to Orcaslicer which has more functionality. It turns out that in Linux you can bypass Bambu Connect all together using some commands, so someone forked Orcaslicer and ported the Linux commands into it. Bambu won’t have that, so they threatened the guy who built it. This guy then said “screw it, guess I’m leaving Bambu printers”. Lot’s of community backlash followed, of which Jeff Geerlings is the latest.

Meanwhile, Bambu will give every Youtube maker with ten followers a free printer for brand recognition and advertizing.