Interview with Paul Berberian, CEO of Orbotix – HAXLR8R.

What is your opinion of open hardware and does it have a role in a for-profit company?
Haven’t seen it work yet and I think it is a myth. Successful hardware is designed, perfected and then mass produced – open software can be fluid and change dynamically and released and re-released without much of a cost to redeploy. In hardware once you lock into a design any change can cost a lot and require all sorts of tooling and certification changes. An open design is about rapid iteration and a pseudo crowd sourced level of participation. Who pays for the tooling, the prototypes, the certs? Who gets to choose that this is the design that will sell in the market? I’m not saying it is impossible – just haven’t seen it work.