*You can give away the software and charge just a few bucks for the hardware, but then all the real trouble comes from talking to people about it while trying to get the stuff to actually work.
*The answer? Crowdsourcing charity and burning-off VC money. Uhm, does that business model make sense in the long run?
*Maybe there ISN'T any "long run" and the whole shebang is best understood as hobbyist performance-art.
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There are very clear benefits of an open source hardware business — for everyone. The costs of individual electronic components and production drop off drastically at higher quantities, meaning that most open source hardware companies can afford to sell their products for less money, while still giving you all of the designs so that you can see how they work and fiddle with them.
Open source software usually relies on offering a consulting business around an open source product — where you can work with your software more efficiently than others can. However, things get a lot murkier when open source hardware and software collide — which will be happening more and more in the future.
In Espruino, the aim has always been to replace hardware complexity with software complexity. The hardware is very simple, but the software is extremely complex and takes the vast majority of the development time (at least 10 times more). I have to mark up the cost of my hardware in order to pay for the time it takes to develop the software. This makes my boards very uncompetitive compared to a $2 ESP8266 board that’s had Espruino flashed onto it for free, or even another company selling a board with Espruino preinstalled.
This does hurt sales a little, but the biggest problem is actually that of support. If you have a problem with a normal open source hardware board, you’ll talk to the manufacturer. However, if you have a problem with an Arduino clone that you bought from eBay, you’ll go to the Arduino forums. The same is true of Espruino, and users of these other boards generally have more problems because of bad documentation and out-of-date/buggy firmware. It can be very frustrating to provide an appropriate level of customer support and not spend too much time on everyone else but myself. This is especially difficult when I can’t even determine who is using what board! (((It's odd how much this is like Chinese kung-fu. Learning Chinese martial arts was always more of a muscular religion than a "business model." Also: how is the Teacher himself gonna learn anything when he spends all his time teaching newbies?)))
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