Open source software transformed computing through collaborative infrastructure. Why hasn't open hardware followed? Despite decades of advocacy and similar technical collaboration potential, we still face expensive tool licenses, foundry barriers, and fragmented volunteer projects. This isn't an accident, it's the result of the biggest industrial policy failure of the last century.

Three Critical Divergences
Capital intensity: Software tools scale to reasonable costs, once built, they can distributed generally at low-cost. Hardware requires unavoidable physical capital: €100K-€1M annual EDA licenses, €500K-€2M foundry access minimums, substantial prototyping costs. This creates fundamentally different economic dynamics that can't be overcome through better licensing or community organizing.

Institutional vacuum: Open software largely succeeded because new organizational forms emerged to employ maintainers, coordinate development, and provide infrastructure at scale. Open hardware has no equivalent institutional layer. Universities produce research, not production tools. Companies optimize for proprietary capture. Traditional foundations lack capacity to employ hundreds of engineers or deploy patient capital. Governments fund research grants, not operational infrastructure. The missing piece is the organizational capacity to build and maintain technology commons.

Revenue generation: Software can monetize through services, support, and usage, value extracted without controlling physical production. Hardware value concentrates in intellectual property, manufacturing and supply chains, making service-based sustainability far harder. This determines which organizations can viably build hardware commons long-term.

Why the FOSS Community Should Care:
Hardware is becoming the constraint on software freedom. European tech companies pay billions annually in proprietary tool licensing. Supply chain concentration creates strategic vulnerabilities, and geopolitical tensions could cut access to critical design tools or fabrication. Digital sovereignty requires open hardware foundations, not just open software. Without addressing this, FOSS gains remain dependent on proprietary infrastructure.

What You'll Learn:

Why replication fails: Software's organizational models don't transfer to hardware due to structural economic barriers. You can't create "Apache Foundation but for chip design" because the capital requirements, employment scale, and revenue dynamics are categorically different.

The missing institution: What would an "Open Hardware Infrastructure Works", a public institution maintaining open hardware infrastrucutre, might look like? What would an institution like that be able to do to level the playing field and open up hardware development? How would an institution like that be financed? What can we learn from precedents: adapting models from highway authorities, utility companies, and transnational consortia for big infrastructure projects?

This isn't about better funding models or governance reforms. It's recognizing that hardware commons require institutional forms that don't yet exist. Just as societies created new organizational types for railroads, electrification, and telecommunications, we need purpose-built institutions for 21st-century technology infrastructure. The question isn't whether open hardware is desirable, that is clear, it's whether we can design and build organizations capable of developing it at competitive scale.

This talk is relevant for anyone working on digital sovereignty, FOSS sustainability, supply chain resilience, institutional design, or infrastructure commons, and anyone frustrated that hardware seems perpetually behind software in open development despite equivalent technical collaboration potential.