Proprietary hardware supports secrets that ACT against people building upon the encrypted (protected by IPR) code. It's an attempt to artificially create a mono

Proprietary hardware supports secrets that ACT against people building upon the encrypted (protected by IPR) code. It's an attempt to artificially create a monopoly, for the benefit of the owner, NOT society. 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?