Another fundamental fact to consider is the benefits of having open hardware.
When I make software free, it can easily be forked, contributed, and can scale to thousands of contributors. Consider the cost in man-hours to write a patch for Linux.
Now I make my hardware free. How do you submit a patch to a piece of hardware? How many man-hours does it take? How do I test this said patch? How do I accept pull requests? Can a piece of hardware have thousands of contributors? It is definitely significantly less trivial, when compared to software, considering the special equipment one needs to design physical hardware.
A lot of the free software movement revolves around improving software because it is more open. If I release open hardware, I don't see how the same will hold true for free hardware. Open hardware is just a giveaway.
I believe hardware is more akin to art; no one submits a PR to the Mona Lisa.
I've gotten several pull requests to my free hardware design that I sell as my primary source of income. Granted, a PCB change is difficult to test given the minimum order quantity, but other physical designs like cases are easy to do a one-off if you have access to a laser cutter or 3D printer.
As someone mentioned elsewhere in the comments, RMS thinks on a much longer time scale than you and I. Prototyping PCBs is already dramatically easier than it was ten years ago; I'm convinced the cost and MOQ will only continue to drop.
When I make software free, it can easily be forked, contributed, and can scale to thousands of contributors. Consider the cost in man-hours to write a patch for Linux.
Now I make my hardware free. How do you submit a patch to a piece of hardware? How many man-hours does it take? How do I test this said patch? How do I accept pull requests? Can a piece of hardware have thousands of contributors? It is definitely significantly less trivial, when compared to software, considering the special equipment one needs to design physical hardware.
A lot of the free software movement revolves around improving software because it is more open. If I release open hardware, I don't see how the same will hold true for free hardware. Open hardware is just a giveaway.
I believe hardware is more akin to art; no one submits a PR to the Mona Lisa.