This same weak argument gets used against "open source", and while I strongly prefer "free software", I still think it's ridiculous how much people make this claim. Get your own terms. Stop trying to make the world a worse place for those who care about freedom, please.
> Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware.
It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB, have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x the cost than it is to do the initial design.
It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or go with non commercial licenses.
The usefulness I find in open source projects is the ability to learn, fix things etc
>It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB, have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x the cost than it is to do the initial design.
but the author of BlueSCSI didnt do that initial design
> It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or go with non commercial licenses.
This is 100% true. Coming from a software side I was surprised that on the embedded and hardware side everyone just forks. I did try to contact the original arscsino project to contribute back but at the time it was idle and I got no response.