We've eclipsed the usefulness of this birdhouse analogy, but suffice to say being able to replace one proprietary commercial vendor with another doesn't make so

We've eclipsed the usefulness of this birdhouse analogy, but suffice to say being able to replace one proprietary commercial vendor with another doesn't make something open source. > This is some kind of confluence of the values of > FSF captial-F "Free" style software with the more > pragmatic goals associated with open source. Well, pragmatically, if you needed to alter the hardware of this "open source" hardware what percentage of the total electronic complexity would you be working with? I'm going to aim for a conservative one-digit percentile. There's a real and unambiguous line to be drawn in the sand here. If you get "open source" plans for hardware that you can't replicate with third-party fabrication & your own materials it's not open source. It's just a recipe for assembling commercial proprietary components. It's awesome that people publish those recipes, but don't call it open source hardware and dilute the meaning of hardware that is genuinely open.