Motivation: I've thought for a while about creating an open-source hardware venture, but I'm not sure I fully understand why the market isn't more popular than it currently is.
Considerations:
* Form factor/style? It's no secret that many consumers consider their devices as part of their fashion statement.
* Cost? Open source hardware is typically quite a bit more expensive, probably owing to lower numbers of runs and less automation?
* Capability? Maybe closed-sourced solutions are more polished out-of-the-box?
* After market support? Perhaps people feel left in the dark once they get their product without some dedicated support team? I guess your average consumer may not be happy about submitting a correctly formatted ticket to some Git interface for example.
* Availability? A lot of open source hardware ventures appear to do short runs in order to ensure they sell out the majority of their stock.
All replies are greatly appreciated :)
To make it work, you need to do something like Adafruit where people buy from you because of quality and to support your mission to build more open source hardware.
For open source hardware, would there be any financial advantage for you? Would someone save/make money by contributing to your open source hardware? Why would someone contribute to your project or simply want to read its source?
I am not saying those answers are "no", I'm genuinely asking you to reflect on that.
Also, it's likely you would have to license other people's IPs and I have no idea if those licenses would forbid you from open sourcing your HW.
https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23OHM2019
there are millions of open-source hardware devices out there, so "popular" would need to be more defined for this question, etc. here are all the posts..
I suppose it's a direct mapping of human nature, where we inherently prioritize return on an investment of money rather than time, which makes sense too
If you are a greedy capitalist, your want to support proprietary source code. If your into state surveillance, you will need it to prevent others auditing your secret code. In fact, proprietary is just off limits for the public to know, to examine, to check, confirm and or establish there isn't any back doors built in.
Open source and open hardware, doesn't want to HIDE secrets, it's about insuring the work gets to be checked, confirmed, proven... imagine building a life support system for a Mars mission, who wants to trust their life with a unknown instructions, and even if the code was decent, it doesn't lend to corrections during the space flight by the astronauts themselves to change, modify or adjust for unknown events, bugs, flaws and design mistakes...
If your going to produce open hardware, NEVER design it for artificial vendor locked in markets, instead support universal hardware that makes it the most used by everyone everywhere, because it permits building upon, auditing, just everything anyone would need to advance, develop and build.
Software engineers should produce the code once, and have it run on every computing device globally.... hence the need for universal hardware, or the implementation of adopting the universal hardware protocol...
These artificial vendor platforms, are nothing but designed exclusively for running monopolies in a money market economy.
The Church did the same long ago, by withholding the knowledge to the commoners. Once the technology of duplicating books became possible by other individuals, an explosion of knowledge could then be shared and developed.
We are entering an intellectual economy, but on the heels of the old gatekeepers, whom wish and want to remains the overlords still. So change will favor their enforcement, but you never change things by just fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete!
Open hardware does that, it makes the old proprietary hardware no longer a monopoly. Why limit hardware to doing just one thing... for one purpose, when open hardware could be reused, recycled, even upgraded and combined with other hardware...
Forcing people to be locked out, requiring jail-breaking their devices is what proprietary code is all about.
Open hardware lets everyone become engineers, because they discover news ways of making things function, work and operate on hardware that builds upon prior work. No 787 aerocraft could be built if it was not for the combined effort given by a great deal of many different individuals over a long period of time to achieve the results so many just take for granted today.
How many other things require previous work to exist in order to develop something better?