"OpenHardware is engineering on an artist's business model" -Logxen (at least the first person I heard say it :) ) Openhardware is more than about being the ch

"OpenHardware is engineering on an artist's business model" -Logxen (at least the first person I heard say it :) ) Openhardware is more than about being the cheapest...it is about free modification of anything and everything involved in the project and the ability to share, innovate, sell (as long as GPL is respected) and create. I would actually argue that what makes OSHW projects weaker is the race to the bottom. I watched this happen in more than one OSHW community so far that I have been involved in. Largely, the core devs abandon projects once they get big enough to bring in the cloners since typically you end up getting a lot of "You need to fix this because we are using it, we don't care if we buy your hardware, you are responsible for making it work to my needs". I know this is very common in OSS as well. It is very frustrating to watch happen knowing that the cloners (in our case) do not respect GPL of the project, do not handle their own customer support and sell at a rate which makes it so the "real devs" cannot afford to maintain the project. Even knowing all this though...I still have a focus on OSHW over patents. My personal belief is that patents only are valuable if you can defend them. I also feel that if I have something valuable enough to want to patent it is probably something the world may need...why not give it away and help everyone. The real benefit of OSHW is the same thing that can make it very difficult as well...everything is open, so you leave yourself open to all compliments as well as criticisms...there are times where some people with very high level training are willing to help by contributing but more importantly by trolling. If you can fix the issues that they are complaining about, it shows that you are interested in helping the community (and at times they are also very high level people who are not intending to help but they are pointing out issues which may be opaque to the devs). As far as OSHW robotics. Look into Moveo for a hardware example (there are others) and ROS for control software. Background: I have been working directly with Reprap since 2011 (Long time member and Op in #reprap@freenode) and working with the Smoothieware/Smoothieboard project since ~2013 doing QA/Inspection/Test/Rework/Hand building protos.