It's frustrating because it's economically inefficient. It's also probably bad for the camera company's shareholders. It may be good for certain company emplo

It's frustrating because it's economically inefficient. It's also probably bad for the camera company's shareholders. It may be good for certain company employees - what economists call a "principal/agent problem". Or perhaps the companies think they are not in a competitive market, and so can make more money by engaging in "price discrimination", where they try to charge customers more if they have more money (indirectly, via artificial software limitations, which they think has this effect). This seems unlikely to me, though. Customer "lock in" to one company's products must be pretty short-term nowadays. If they treated cameras as a competitive market, they would be happy for software to be developed by others, if that's not their competitive advantage (and clearly it's not). They would make money from selling the hardware (cameras, lenses, other accessories). If they're the only company with open source software, they should have a big advantage when selling hardware, and could charge more for it.