First off- excited to announce that I've been accepted into the SOAM Virtual Residency program with the theme ""RE:FUND OUR DIGITAL FUTURE: REIMAGINING FUNDING ARCHITECTURES FOR PUBLIC INTEREST TECHNOLOGY". I applied because I thought this theme would be perfect to try to address the question in the title, because I believe that the core answer is that the current funding models that dominate tech development, from venture capital to ad-tech to data extraction, are fundamentally incompatible with the collaborative, commons-based approach that would make open hardware possible.
When I look at FOSS, I see an ecosystem where open source has fundamentally reshaped how we build, share, and innovate. Entire industries and communities have been built on the foundation of freely shared code, collaborative development, and transparent architectures. But hardware? We've largely surrendered our digital infrastructure to proprietary black boxes. Our phones, laptops, routers, and IoT devices are increasingly locked down, impossible to modify, and controlled by a handful of corporations. We've accepted planned obsolescence, vendor lock-in, and the inability to truly own the devices we depend on.
The consequences of this proprietary hardware dominance extend far beyond inconvenience. When our fundamental computing infrastructure is controlled by a few entities, we face security vulnerabilities that can't be independently audited or fixed, privacy concerns with no way to verify what our devices are actually doing, innovation bottlenecks where progress is gated by corporate priorities, economic dependencies that stifle competition and local manufacturing, and environmental costs from unrepairable, non-upgradeable devices. We've essentially built our digital society on a foundation we can't inspect, modify, or truly control.
A thriving open hardware ecosystem is absolutely possible, and could bring our societies the same transformative benefits that open source software has delivered: greater innovation through collaboration, more secure and auditable systems, democratic control over our technological infrastructure, and economic models that serve public benefit rather than private extraction.
The challenge isn't that open hardware can't work, but that it can't grow at the scale it needs to grow precisely because it's different from software. The material constraints, manufacturing requirements, and coordination challenges that distinguish hardware development demand different institutional approaches. It also doesn't help that the open hardware infrastructure, or the technologies we need to develop open hardware, are also proprietary. That's why we need a new type of institution: a public works for open hardware infrastructure.
During this residency, I'm developing a concept for exactly that. I'm exploring how we might create sustainable economic models for open hardware infrastructure development that don't rely on the extractive capitalism that has shaped our current tech landscape. The fundamental challenge is economic and institutional. We need a public open hardware infrastructure works that is built around patient capital funding and mission-driven development, drawing inspiration from historical models like Dutch water bonds and modern transnational institutions like Airbus and CERN.
To alleviate the challenges of bootstrapping such a massive infrastructure project, we need an approach where patient capital allows for the longer development cycles that hardware requires, and where mission-driven priorities can align with public benefit rather than private extraction. The goal isn't just to create more open hardware projects, but to design the institutional foundations that would make open hardware development sustainable and scalable at a systemic level.
If that topic is interesting to you, then I'm all ears. I'm particularly interested in hearing from institutional designers interested in alternative models for tech financing, hardware developers who've struggled with the challenges of open hardware projects, manufacturers who are frustrated by proprietary tooling and licencing fees, policy researchers thinking about the regulatory and economic dimensions, and anyone who's frustrated with the current state of proprietary hardware dominance.
I'll be sharing more details as as my residency progresses, but I'd love to start the conversation now. Feel free to write to me on mastodon with your thoughts.