Also since this seems to have caught the attention of our academic members personally, and since the UK currently has a university strike going on, let me, as a non-academic researcher, express my support for all my academic brethren and my hope for the success of the strike. Viva la revolution!
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Bonisagus is about research. Not about letting the Order benefit from it or even see it,
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I fear the code disagrees.
Their actions disagree with the Code
Considering how important is House Acclaim, there is a strong incentive to share their knowledge and get acknowledgement for it.
There is also the tradition/duty to publish every 7 years a Folios of the most meaningful work by the Colentes Arcanorum.
So my take on Bonisagus mages is that they are very secretive about their research (so nobody can steal their idea or shortcut them), until their research is completed, then they cannot wait to publish the results and enjoy the fame and glory going with it.
Very childish... 
Which makes perfect sense. If someone wizards warred you, and took all the lab notes for a project that had been going on for decades, they could wrap it up fairly swiftly and get all the rewards, status and prestige for the breakthrough without having done most of the work and you'd get nothing.
For safety the bonisagus would have to either go all out with the openness (like a register of the breakthrough they are working on) so that everyone would know if you stole the research or be completely secretive and not tell anyone. The latter is much easier to do.
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I will reread the GotR book but IIRC, trying to get access to the books for non-Bonisagus is extremely hard if not impossible. So while they get House acclaim for their research the knowledge is not spread to the Order without a huge amount of kicking and screaming and even then it is held tightly.
I think they are shy of the impact that AoH had on the Order. Or at least that is the excuse.
IIRC, Access to the books is not an issue (though there may be restricted areas or topics in the library), the issue is space, living or lab spaces. So there is a queue for the space needed to utilize lab texts, if you just want to copy and don’t need Magus level accommodations then you can copy some books for them and copy some for yourself.
Incorrect. No one can copy the books without the permission of the Librarian. You can't enter the Library without contributing an original work. You can, of course, bride the Librarian with vis for access. All of the above is waved for Bonisagus.
The knowledge is there. it is just really time consuming to get it out to the Order.
Except the Tremere tried this leading up to the Sundering. The Tremere are somewhere between the mob and a fascist party. The people who rise to the top are the ones with the most clout at the proxy-for-violence. They go around bullying people through certamen, and while being organised and efficient is definitely a good thing, being part of a pyramid scheme is really not something that mages will be embracing short of being forced to.
You’re right, you can’t copy books but you can copy lab texts. But you did seem to skip over a paragraph:
Instead of contributing a tome or spell, a magus may instead gain a single season of credit by volunteering for a sea-son of copying. (There is always a backlog of such work that needs to be done.) This is, however, considered demeaning duty suitable only for apprentices, who typical-ly earn credit in this way during their sea-sons of stay at Durenmar.
Point is that unless you are willing to travel to Durnenmar, you are not seeing the books. That is why the Bonisagus say they are sharing without having to actually share with the Order.
But it could easily be argued that the books are less "sharing the knowledge" than lab texts, which they will send to you (eventually) if you merely ask via Redcap.
Any breakthrough-level research should, likely, be included in the Folio and that is spread throughout the Order, though the timescale for receiving a copy may be a while.
Hi,
The weird thing is that the canonical sample of "most meaningful work" is rather pathetic. My takeaway from the Bonisagus chapter is that the House only pays lip service to sharing knowledge, has organized itself to make sure that it shares little to nothing of import, and is in fact a great waste of space, a parasite on the rest of the Order, a decadent husk of a once-great tradition.
I was not at all sure whether the author (and editor) intended to represent House Bonisagus in this way.
Anyway,
Ken
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I think that's more 4th edition Tremere than 5th edition. 5e is more like an army. Which still isn't to everyone's taste, but not something that no-one ever would want to be a part of.
An alternative to the "second class magi" approach which doesn't require you to find more Gifted children is to work out how to initiate unGifted individuals into individual Hermetic Arts (probably taking inspiration from the Order of Solomon). That does require a breakthrough, so is a lot of work and may not be possible, but it's arguably nice if you can get it (and even better if you ignore the aura depletion rules).
This too is an interesting option, especially if you rule that the problem of finding gifted apprentices is not in the finding but in the supply. unGifted initiates also cannot learn the Parma magica and so are less of a liability.
Regarding breakthroughs I think we are in the territory where breakthroughs of some sort are all but required to progress and the question is really more one of what breakthrough and how many breakthroughs.
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Surely, anyone can submit to the rule of House Tremere, they just can't join the Inner Party.
Why would anyone even want to?
Lose your voting right, get ordered around by someone who just happens to be better at certamen than you...
Absolutely!
I think you are confusing being IN House Tremere vs following their rules for governing.