100% agree. Open source hardware is a marketing tool that can be highly effective. Adafruit is the master of this type of marketing (Pimoroni are pretty good to

100% agree. Open source hardware is a marketing tool that can be highly effective. Adafruit is the master of this type of marketing (Pimoroni are pretty good too). They are selling an ecosystem of parts that enable making nearly anything. The idea of being a maker is everywhere on their site. It’s the difference between going to a wood working shop and a Home Depot - many of the products may be similar or even identical but the goal and the brand are different. Sparkfun never fit as well in the maker space, and their move towards closed source isn’t surprising in light of their slow decline over the past few years. Their marketing is much more engineer focused, including their product selection. Adafruit and Pimoroni have the bravery to make new product categories knowing the clones are coming but that they will capture enough of the market to succeed in them anyways. Neopixels are the prime example of this to me. I love shopping at Adafruit. They make it easy to want to buy from them. It will just work, I know it will just work, and I know they have a library and an example project waiting for me. I can get the “same” thing on AliExpress often for half or less (depending on the part). But not with the same fit and finish, not with a no solder hookup, and not this week. And if I do buy it on AliExpress I will use an Adafruit library with it. Open source means everyone using parts they introduced to the maker market is their customer, some just didn’t buy the part from them. Open source helps their customers reverse engineer their products more than their competitors. Paying someone with actual electrical engineering background to read data sheets closer/better than me is well worth it. I’ll buy their parts, prototype with a few of them, and then make the combined form factor I want with JLCPCB. Adafruit even published many of the tutorials teaching how me to do this! They win by trusting their customer enough to let them go free, knowing they will come back.