I appreciate where you're coming from, but I think you may have unintentionally made my point.
Try this: Change the context "Acme's Sunscreen which is made from killing an endangered fish, is significantly better than any other sunscreen out there, and because it is already on fish we know it doesn't hurt the ocean!" except the production of Acme Sunscreen is leading to the extinction of said fish in the future. Short term profits, long term loss, and perhaps a bet that at some point what ever it is about the fish that makes great sunscreen will be figured out.
Using FOSS requires (by license) that you give back your changes, which, when functional prevents a vendor from exploiting the work of a bunch of people they didn't pay, to make a product where they pay a few people to push it way past what the community offers. Whereas if they had been publishing their changes, then their product wouldn't be "significantly ahead" because everyone using the same slicer base code would be able to also use Bambu's improvements. But Bambu doesn't do that because why let the competitors take advantage of the work of people who they didn't compensate for that work. Hmmm?
Except that the software part of the "significantly ahead" is in the device firmware, not the slicer. And it's only the slicer that's at issue in this debate. If it were the slicer that provided all this advantage over the competition it'd have been copied years ago, so this is really nothing to do with my point at all.
Again, I'd be far happier if they followed the terms of the AGPL and provided source for their custom slicing extensions, but it wouldn't really move the needle very much for the competition.
You realize that the slicer has to talk to the firmware, and it is documenting the commands their firmware implements which makes the combination of slicer + firmware print right? The whole point of the AGPL on the slicer was to prevent people from having special sauce printer firmware, get all the work of the slicer for "free" and then make their combination better than everyone else's. So you publish the code the slicer uses to talk to your device and that lets someone else implement the same codes (if they choose too).
Try this: Change the context "Acme's Sunscreen which is made from killing an endangered fish, is significantly better than any other sunscreen out there, and because it is already on fish we know it doesn't hurt the ocean!" except the production of Acme Sunscreen is leading to the extinction of said fish in the future. Short term profits, long term loss, and perhaps a bet that at some point what ever it is about the fish that makes great sunscreen will be figured out.
Using FOSS requires (by license) that you give back your changes, which, when functional prevents a vendor from exploiting the work of a bunch of people they didn't pay, to make a product where they pay a few people to push it way past what the community offers. Whereas if they had been publishing their changes, then their product wouldn't be "significantly ahead" because everyone using the same slicer base code would be able to also use Bambu's improvements. But Bambu doesn't do that because why let the competitors take advantage of the work of people who they didn't compensate for that work. Hmmm?
See how that works?