I'm the maintainer of KnightOS [1], an open source effort to build an operating system that runs on the TI-84+ (and other TI calculators). I've been tossing around the idea of also building open source calculator hardware for far cheaper than TI calculators (which are way more expensive than reasonable). In this dream I would also spend some time lobbying professors and teachers to break the monopoly and educating them on why open source is great. Is that something I should pursue? Would a kickstarter or something to raise funds for hardware be a worthwhile effort?
[1] http://knightos.org