I agree that price is not enough but I do think price/performance is. I believe this is why the consumer Linux desktop has not been as successful as enterprise

I agree that price is not enough but I do think price/performance is. I believe this is why the consumer Linux desktop has not been as successful as enterprise Linux. It may take 15 years for the idea of open source hardware to be accepted. Once people are comfortable that lower price does not imply lower quality I doubt that it will be a hard sell. I agree that now that may not be the case for the museum environmental sensor market but until someone try's it will not be known. Open source software achieves its cost savings by eliminating or greatly reducing many levels of organization and overhead that exist in proprietary software vendors (i.e. sales, marketing, human resources, project management,..) not by reducing quality. Larry Augustine has a good article describing this http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=54 http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=54. It is reasonable to think that the same thing could happen with hardware.