Afaik the firmware is self developed and closed source, so not free. as in freedom of code and free as in beer.
The software slicer is based on prusa slicer which is based on slic3r which uses the agplv3 which dictates that all works derived from the original code needs to be published as code under the same license. They do that. But the trick is that they add closed source modules that are essential for the whole system to work and therefore control their devices and ecosystem via restrictive licenses or plain unavailability of sources.
Regarding creality : the last time I used a creality printer it used marlin as firmware and it was trivial to compile and flash and modify.
But in general you don’t need to make your product easy to jailbreak under most ooensource licenses, you need to publish the code. Those are two different things.
Afaik the firmware is self developed and closed source, so not free. as in freedom of code and free as in beer.
The software slicer is based on prusa slicer which is based on slic3r which uses the agplv3 which dictates that all works derived from the original code needs to be published as code under the same license. They do that. But the trick is that they add closed source modules that are essential for the whole system to work and therefore control their devices and ecosystem via restrictive licenses or plain unavailability of sources.
Regarding creality : the last time I used a creality printer it used marlin as firmware and it was trivial to compile and flash and modify.
But in general you don’t need to make your product easy to jailbreak under most ooensource licenses, you need to publish the code. Those are two different things.