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13 Open Source Hardware Companies Make $1+ Million

Posted by kdawson on from the make-it-up-on-volume dept.

kkleiner writes "Selling products whose design anyone can access, edit, or use on their own is pretty crazy. It's also good business. At the annual hacker conference Foo Camp East this year, Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried from Adafruit Industries gave a rapid fire five-minute presentation on thirteen companies with million+ dollar revenues from open source hardware. The thirteen add up to $50 million this year. While this business model is counter-intuitive for those accustomed to our current patent- and copyright-encrusted system, Torrone and Fried estimate that the industry will reach a billion dollars by 2015."

6 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. $1M revenue is not "making a million" by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 5, Informative

    In the world of hardware there is an enormous difference between the two. You can easily have $1M in revenue and lose your shirt (make a huge loss).

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  2. No mention of Digium? by GNUALMAFUERTE · · Score: 3, Informative

    Their products are amazing. In case you are not familiar, Mark Spencer and crew are the guys behind Asterisk, the best PBX ever. Their hardware business is actually pretty big, and they also provide asterisk-related services, including training and support.

    Considering that 20% of all PBXs in use are Asterisk-based, I thought it was worth mentioning it.

    --
    WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
    1. Re:No mention of Digium? by EdIII · · Score: 2, Informative

      That's not what open source hardware means.

      open source hardware (OSHW). Companies providing OSHW allow all designs of the products to be shared through an open license, meaning that everyone is free to download, modify, and share all the schematics and associated software.

      Asterisk, which I agree is completely awesome, is just some open source software you can run on Linux, an open source operating system.

      Open source hardware would be a router in which you can modify the firmware (software) to suit your needs, and the case outlined above, even create new hardware on the same design specifications.

      The examples they give in the article are MakerBot, Buglabs, and Arduino, and I just don't think you can compare their hardware and how freely you can modify it, with some PBX software that requires Linux to run on a piece of hardware.

      In fact, the hardware that Digium puts inside their rackmount appliances running Asterisk is just as much a 'closed' piece of hardware as any one of the 1U servers I manage in various datacenters.

  3. Re:Open Source by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1, Informative

    AMD made $5.4 billion last year and Intel made around $35 billion. Each of these companies make more revenue in an hour than the yearly revenue of any of these companies.

  4. Re:Open Source by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 2, Informative

    Even ARM, which is significantly smaller than either of those, makes $305 million in revenue. There's nothing impressive about making $1 million in revenue.

  5. Digium is a perfect example except for one thing by ClosedSource · · Score: 5, Informative

    Their hardware isn't open source.