> Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money

> Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that. There's a lot of this. People think there's huge sums of money to be made in open source hardware because of Arduino and Raspberry Pi. It's such a broken misconception (not just because most of Arduino and almost all of Raspberry Pi is closed source) it's almost laughable. The people doing ok out of open hardware are people like Great Scott Gadgets, Simon Monk, RC2014, Digistump etc. None of these guys are warming their fires with spare $100 bills, but they're all doing amazing open source work and are making enough to eek out a living. Open source hardware has all the money-making benefits of shooting yourself in the foot from the get go just like with Open source software, but with orders of magnitude higher startup costs. Sure, there can be successes, but those that are tend to be rarely fully open.