What is the prospect of open source hardware?

Recently, I happened to be interested in the technology of combining soft and hard, so I tried to answer this question. I think there are essential differences between hardware engineering and software engineering, which makes the open source work of hardware far more complicated than software. 1. Modular, standardized and modified convenience software products have fully defined inputs and outputs and can be adjusted at any time. Once a software module has passed the writing and running tests, it can be regarded as a black box, which is called and run by another fully defined module. As long as the interfaces between software remain unchanged, the logic between modules will not change, which enables software developers to cooperate with each other only through defined interfaces, no matter where these developers are. Engineers are not so lucky in the field of hardware. First of all, as long as you know the interface, there is no hardware in the world that can be added to the design. Hardware selection is a very troublesome thing. Even hardware designers who have worked for many years may stumble over such trivial things as interface voltage or clock frequency matching when choosing hardware devices that have never been used-contact resistance and parasitic capacitance anywhere may destroy the whole circuit. Hardware designers do not have powerful IDE, beautiful compiler and interpreter. All hardware engineers were told in the first EDA design class that software simulation is unreliable and can only be used as a reference. The only thing that hardware design can rely on is a solid theoretical foundation and repeated experimental tests. For example, "an engineer from China and an engineer from the United States jointly developed a long-distance signal collector", which is normal for open source software, but impossible in the hardware field. Hardware designers must sit together to simulate and test chips and circuit boards. 2. Production and release costs In the process of software development, once the interface of a module needs to be changed, what the software engineer has to do is to sit in front of the computer and modify the code, and then notify everyone who needs to use the module by SMS, telephone, email or git and svn, so that everyone can debug and modify it together. The communication cost and modification cost of this process are basically zero except manpower. The cost of distributing software is even lower. In the past, carriers such as floppy disks had to be used. Now with the internet, it is basically zero cost. The situation of hardware development is the opposite. When hardware engineers go to great lengths to make analog circuits and send them to factories for expensive manufacture, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and spectrum analyzers (all of which are valuable) will tell you that this thing is wrong with harsh facts. If you are a board track, congratulations. If you are lucky, some equipment in rework can save your design. If you are doing chip-level design, you should be prepared to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on analysis, X-ray, FIB and other tests. Find out the problem, replay the film and see if God can bless you. The cost of hardware design and modification is really too high, which is why the market of universal boards such as Arduino and IP core is so hot now. In addition, when the products sell well, the construction of warehousing, freight, distribution and after-sales systems will definitely cost money. In hardware products companies, the cost of developers is often only a small part. 3. Entry Threshold In today's extremely developed software industry, anyone with good logical thinking ability can get enough education through the Internet as long as he is interested, so he can be called a software developer. All the investment is just a computer with internet access. This makes the number of programmers keep rising, and you can always meet a few programmers who are idle and looking for trouble to cooperate with some interesting things. But the hardware industry still needs professionals with training background to design and develop. I have never met a self-taught electronic hardware design engineer. Training a qualified hardware design engineer requires a lot of basic theory study of physics and electronics, and is accompanied by a lot of internship work using various instruments, in which the cost of time and materials is very high. The small number of hardware engineers, coupled with the aforementioned difficulties in collaboration, makes it difficult to find a group of hardware engineers to get together and do high-risk open source work. In a word, if you want to open source hardware, you need to overcome the problems of nonstandard design, high cost and high entry threshold. In my opinion, these problems are difficult to be solved in a short time.