There are fundamental flaws in this idea of trying to treat hardware as software. They are very different animals. A better designation might be "physical pro

There are fundamental flaws in this idea of trying to treat hardware as software. They are very different animals. A better designation might be "physical products". It seems these discussions tend to ignore the fact that physical products are not simply circuit boards with a handful of chips and code. As an example, we developed an advanced high power LED light source. The design took a year of engineering. During this time hundreds of LED's and a myriad of circuit technologies and driving approaches were explored. Thermal management alone required six months of iterating through a family of designs. Initial designs were tested and fine tuned with thermal FEA tools and physical test candidates were machined in our CNC shop for real testing. Past that, some of the advanced approaches we used required designing and building custom manufacturing tools and production test equipment. Just think about the cost, not just in man-hours but also prototyping, testing, materials, regulatory, etc. So it is because of this and over 30 years in the hardware manufacturing wold that I say, with all due respect, that the view being put forth is rather myopic and naive. Fine for little Arduino type gizmos and perhaps even some chips but it breaks down very quickly once you start to hit what I am going to call "the real world". This is where reproducing or iterating a design might require an infrastructure in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and potentially deep multidisciplinary capabilities. In the software world any 15 year old with enough motivation to dive into a large open source project can do so armed with a $200 laptop. They can learn and iterate at practically no cost. Not so in the case of physical products.