Kristen Dirksen of faircompanies.com talks to Massimo about Arduino. She writes:

The Arduino- an affordable, open source microcontroller board- has been touted as connecting the real world to your computer (a few Arduino projects: a battery life extender; a DIY Water meter; a tweeting; self-watering garden system; an open energy monitor; a sun-tracking solar panel). We talk to Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi about the power of the Arduino, how it’s “not for nerds” and how it was kept alive by the fact that it was open source.

The last part — specifically how Arduino stayed alive by being open source — makes an interesting point about the potentially short life-cycle of closed hardware.