It is sociality absolutely equivalent to software.

We're not talking about software, the microscope is a product involving research and development, a team of engineers, a production facility, and accompanying software. To say "this software should be open source" is to disregard the product that it's a part of.

I'm not trying to be condescending but the investment required to produce specialised lab equipment is several orders of magnitude greater than that required to author a book.

And, yeah, actually, giving away free copies is absolutely denying a future sale of that publication.

No it's not because of the people you give free copies, only an infinitessimal minority would actually buy one. Plus every copy you give away promotes additional sales. Also, IDK anything about you so I don't intend this to be as condescending as it sounds - but it's very common to buy a run of 10,000 books just to call yourself a best selling author. Giving away books is pretty meaningless I'm sorry.

If you don’t want to believe any of us, that’s on you, but calling that many people liars tends to be dumber than dammit if you don’t have a good reason to do so.

I do have some specialist knowledge in this area. I advise people on strategic business decisions in the course of my work. I don't care very much whether you believe me or think I'm dumber than damnit but it's safe to say that few commenters here have a better understanding of people's behavior with business & profit decisions than I do.

I absolutely would at least open source any deprecated software like the post is discussing

Then you couldn't run a viable company in an oligopoly. It's a mistake to think of this as deprecated software. It's a component of an earlier product. Microsoft isn't going to opensource windows 10 just because windows 11 has been released.

That’s my principle, I fully support the right to repair.

No one is impeding the right to repair. Old mate is repairing the computers that run windows 95.

Maybe you don’t think that way. Maybe you want to maximize profits over any other concern.

I don't think it's really fair to make assumptions about my character just because I pointed out an alternative perspective that seems completely lost in these threads.

Frankly, assuming that every company you interact with are greedy fat cats is very lazy thinking.

For all you know the producers of this expensive lab equipment are using sales to labs in wealthy research labs to subsidise free microscopes for tertiary institutions in developing nations.

Unfortunately it seems like all you have is a right to repair hammer and you're trying to hit everything with it even in cases where it doesn't apply.