[woodrowbarlow]

agreed; open hardware generally guarantees the possibility of open software, even if the product ships with closed software.

however; the interview is really talking about using open software to create your open hardware designs. if you've developed your schematic using proprietary software, then only people who have the same proprietary (paid) software can contribute.

another interesting point they touched on is open instruction sets (e.g. RISC-V). people are developing open hardware platforms with open software solutions but in the middle there is ARM or some other proprietary processor instruction set.