Which isn't free (and easy to use!) either.

And I forgot about another thing too: the supply of people. While everyone and their dog can attend some six weeks coding bootcamp or teach themselves using free and open resources and can then start contributing to open source code, dealing with hardware requires a good education in fundamental physics, good amounts of money for components and tooling (a good soldering iron, air filters, fine-controlled hot air gun, a decent oven, the equipment and the chemicals for etching, a precise micro-drill, ...). Many people don't have that amount of upfront money and skills, and those that do often don't have the amount of free time to help advance open source because, as I wrote, it takes lots of time and money to deal with smart hardware.

> everyone and their dog can attend some six weeks coding bootcamp or teach themselves using free and open resources and can then start contributing to open source code

Perhaps this was intended to be hyperbolic, but no, you can't become a kernel developer, say, in six weeks. You can learn to dabble in web development in that time, but you'll barely have taken the first step toward being a serious software engineer.

They said that it was possible to contribute to open source, which is surely true. Not that they could be a kernel developer.

Granted, but six weeks is easily long enough to learn how to assemble a computer, or to do basic soldering. If we're going to compare hardware skills and software skills, let's do so in a reasonable way. If we're talking about building a new system from the ground up, I think the comparison to kernel development is about right.

Much skill is needed to make a serious contribution to an open hardware project, but the same is true for many types of software.

I don't think you understand very well how hardware design works. Most hardware designers write code just like software developers. Most of them have never used a hot air gun, and most of them can't explain in much detail how a transistor works at the physical level (they learned this once in their education, but have since forgotten, simply because they don't need to know this in their daytime jobs). Yes, once you need to fab your design (and iterate on it) you need other disciplines, but the work here is more or less the same for any design.

PCB design doesn't involve much coding. It's typically done in a semi-manual way using a CAD-like interface. Here's an example for a simple board:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b1UdOmxVrw

There is, as yet, no magical piece of software that automatically produces good layouts - not even for simple designs like this where signal integrity is of little concern.

> Most hardware designers write code just like software developers.

You're talking about people doing FPGA work which is a totally different skillset than making your own PCBs - and even more lacking in people contributing to open-source projects because it is (at least in my opinion) even harder to get a grasp on, and capable FPGA development boards cost a boatload of money.

I'm pretty sure he meant people who design hardware using Hardware Description Languages which aren't only used to configure FPGAs... you can build ASICs using them too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language

I completely agree with your overall point, but on a pedantic note, you don't need to etch your own PCBs these days.