I see that you seem to be giving an answer for the "general case", while I was trying to think about the specifics of a certain piece of hardware. Regarding po

I see that you seem to be giving an answer for the "general case", while I was trying to think about the specifics of a certain piece of hardware. Regarding point 1, sure, open hardware is indeed a good addition to the privacy and security sectors. If you have hardware focused on those problems, open hardware will definitely be an advantage. Regarding point 2, the "ease" part in software actually means "really easy" since it only requires you to recompile and redistribute, but with hardware things will definitely become a little harder since it requires making the physical thing. You need an entire ecosystem for that. 3. None of that requires open hardware. Sure, having the specs allows you to verify the quality to some extent, but I'm assuming only very restricted sectors would care about that. That said, I would already be happy if the industry simply reverted the current shift of "move everything to closed firmware" that is happening :(. Open drivers with closed firmware is very disappointing.