The push from Adafruit at least seemed rather bizarre and cynical to me. All of a sudden, they started caring about the open-source status of hardware that predated the Arduino split and using it as justification for why Musto was evil and needed to go. This wasn't something they'd cared about before. Indeed, when Bre Pettis and Makerbot went against their loudly-proclaimed principles and took their 3D printers (which borrowed heavily from other's open designs) closed source while hiding behind vague statements, Adafruit's response was to post a piece that compared the people who criticised Makerbot to "fundamentalists" who "blow things up" and claimed to be defending "open source innovation and polite disagreement" by doing so: https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-sour...
Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.
Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.