I have lost all hope that it will ever be otherwise. It's quite straightforward to build smart home devices for youself that are reliable and don't depend on the whims of some cloud or firmware vendor, but the minute you try to form a company that sells them you'll be required to generate a continuing revenue stream which means shitting on your customers in one way or the other.

Is this true? I’ve used open source printers from Lulzbot and others, and I haven’t had this experience. I think the moral of the story is to not put stuff on some closed platform in the cloud, not that you shouldn’t use company-provided hardware.

I think his point was that it is hard to keep a company going making just the hardware. The margins are low, and customers only have to pay you once, to get the hardware.

It is hard to make a lasting business off that, which is why everyone wants to do subscription services.

It used to be the only way to make business in not so long past. People made money selling products just fine.

Maybe it's because people trying to get rich quick playing the VC lottery are sucking the oxygen out for people who want to just do a honest to God, "payment in exchange for providing value" type of business.

Yes, I think it's the VC mindset. It's "grow fast and exit quick" rather than "build a sustainable business."

I honestly have give it quite a bit of thought as to what it would take to start an open source hardware company. Everything has a user accessable API and the option to use their own firmware if they want.

The more important thing than hack-ability is that the product is rock solid.

That implies stuff like "there is one way to do it", "95+% branch coverage in unit tests", and "100,000-1M hours of automated stress testing of real hardware before shipping a new board rev."

and any cloud services would be AGPL