When open becomes opaque: The changing face of open-source hardware companies
Wow, Eagle gets shut down, Sparkfun, Arduino and Prusa all go closed source.  The amazing free open hardware future we&#x27;ve all been promised is falling down around us.<p>I do like Limor&#x27;s response &quot;I’m going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it,”  She&#x27;s fighting the good fight as always.<p>I&#x27;ve been designing hardware for decades.  I&#x27;ve come to learn that it&#x27;s more about staying ahead of competitors technically than keeping them from copying you.  There will always be copies, you just need to be selling the next better version while the copies are of your previous version.  There is no &quot;make a thing, profit for 20 years&quot;.  If companies like prusa or sparkfun stay knowledge leaders, people will be willing to pay a few extra dollars foe their product over a clone just to have the improved support, documentation and quality, also to support what they want to support.  Making this change makes these companies no different than the clones now.  This move takes away incentive for me to order products from these companies and I believe will actually cause them to loose more business than they are expecting.  Their whole sales model is built around this.  It&#x27;s why I order stuff from them, or used to.