The OrcaSlicer fork Bambu Lab killed has six mirrors. Jeff Geerling joined the boycott.

The OrcaSlicer fork Bambu Lab shut down on May 1 is back, this time in six community mirrors. Jeff Geerling, who owns a Bambu P1S, posted on May 12 that the company is “abusing the open source social contract” and said he won’t recommend a Bambu printer again. Right-to-repair advocate Louis Rossmann pledged $10,000 toward Pawel Jarczak’s legal defense.

Bambu’s cease-and-desist worked for nine days. After that, the same code came back at FULU-Foundation/OrcaSlicer-bambulab and at least four parallel mirrors. The Hacker News thread on Geerling’s post crossed 1,200 points within 24 hours, and the takedown that was supposed to scare off contributors instead pulled in a million-subscriber reviewer and a public legal pledge.

What we know

• The fork is back. FULU-Foundation/OrcaSlicer-bambulab tagged v1.0.0 on May 12 and sits at 1,700 stars, 427 forks, and 43 watchers. The README is one line: “OrcaSlicer with restored BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers, with full internet access and printing just like before.”
• Four more mirrors host the same restored code: unS0uL/OrcaSlicer-bambulab, dafik/OrcaSlicer-bambulab, ChrispyBacon-dev/orcaslicer-bambulab, and koosoli/OrcaSlicer-bambulab. Each lists the same one-line description.
• Geerling, who reviewed the Bambu P1S on his million-subscriber YouTube channel, said in his post that he blocked his printer from the internet, stopped accepting firmware updates, locked it into Developer mode, and switched to OrcaSlicer. He won’t buy another Bambu Lab printer.
• Louis Rossmann committed $10,000 toward Jarczak’s legal defense, per coverage of Geerling’s post and Rossmann’s own public statement.
• Bambu’s legal claim hasn’t softened. The cease-and-desist accused Jarczak’s fork of “injected falsified identity data into network communications to mimic the official client.” Bambu Studio is published under AGPL-3.0, the same license Warp open-sourced its terminal under. The new mirrors inherit the same legal footing as the original.

What we don’t know

• Whether Bambu Lab will send a second wave of cease-and-desists. The FULU Foundation has no public contact page. Several mirror maintainers are pseudonymous. Bambu’s response to a multi-jurisdiction posture hasn’t been tested.
• What the FULU Foundation actually is. The GitHub organization has only this one repository and no other public footprint, which looks like a deliberate hedge against takedown service.
• Whether Rossmann’s pledge becomes a counterclaim. Jarczak hasn’t said publicly whether he’ll fight the original cease-and-desist in court. A funded defense is a different posture than a quiet takedown.
• Whether the upstream OrcaSlicer project takes a position. The maintainers have stayed neutral on the dispute, and the open issue asking about the Bambu plugin sits without official comment.

Why one takedown spawned six mirrors

Bambu’s letter landed at the worst possible moment for its objective. Jarczak had built the fork on Bambu Studio’s own AGPL-3.0 source, the upstream that Prusa originally published. Pulling the public copy created exactly one thing: a written motive for redistribution. Anyone who’d cloned the repository before May 1 was free to publish under the same license, and the legal threat made the code valuable in a way it hadn’t been before.

The Streisand mechanic isn’t subtle here. The takedown turned a niche slicer fork into a cause, and the cause pulled in a YouTuber whose review of the P1S now points the other direction. The cost to Bambu Lab is the next 12 months of product-launch coverage where every reviewer asks about Bambu Connect and the AGPL fork, instead of about the printer itself.

What this means for you

If you own a Bambu Lab printer and want OrcaSlicer with cloud printing back, the community mirror is alive and the parallel forks make a single takedown moot. Geerling’s recipe is concrete: block the printer from the internet, lock it in Developer mode, and route through OrcaSlicer. The trade-off is firmware updates, including any future security patches Bambu Lab ships.

If you’re shopping and you trust Geerling’s read, his recommendation now points to Prusa, Voron, or the open-frame Cartesian community. Bambu’s hardware is still the fastest sub-$800 printer on the market. The relationship you sign at checkout is the part that changed.

If you maintain an open-source project that touches Bambu hardware, the calculus is different than it was on May 1. Six mirrors and a $10,000 defense pledge mean a Bambu Lab letter no longer ends the project, and that changes how much chill the next letter carries.