I know the community well, I was challenging the assertion this hurts the community. On the contrary, better and cheaper printers help the community way more than the worries over software licensing. The average person doesn't care, they want a printer that works and doesn't cost much.
Its not only a licensing issue, but they abuse this closed source binary to lock away major features from other slicers (DRM, signature checks), hinder development, include anti-debugging, telemetry, encrypt logs and configs, etc.
And the stock plugin ships an unaligned atomic that triggers the kernel's split_lock detector on every modern Intel CPU. Startup stalls for 25-60 seconds while the kernel walks each trap; every Device-tab click hits it again. The workaround (sysctl kernel.split_lock_mitigate=0) degrades system-wide performance and still misbehaves in LAN-only mode. Reported to Bambu over a year ago and still open: bambulab/BambuStudio#8605.
Again, the average person does not care about any of that. They will use the Bambu slicer (if even, I bet many only print from their phones with the app). They aren't aware of, nor do they care about, anti-debugging, telemetry, encrypted logs, or anything of that nature. Most who do use the slicer will probably be on Windows, not Linux, and on an x86_64 machine. Why is any of this a surprise? It's an appliance, not something to hack on. It would be one thing if it was presented that way, like the Prusas, but it is explicitly sold as a turnkey machine. If you don't like that, you can buy a printer from one of their many competitors, or build a printer yourself, Bambu is not stopping you.
