Once you start doing the numbers it becomes obvious. There is no margin in this. So many crowd funding projects start out like this only to find out months or years later it's impossible to build a sustainable company by selling pre-assembled open source devices. Especially because who care about the 'open' thing will download the image and burn an SD card themselves.
No margin, and you're in for your research. However OSS on IoT could be a huge competitive advantage, if you can persuade consumers not to buy knock-offs.
When Tesla and Nest created a high-end market, they created self-contained objects. They sold because they were good, not because they had a competitive edge on the closed-source software running them. I set Apple apart because they have high margins on accessories, so open APIs would be a drawback here. My point is: We spend that much money for those products because the're good quality in themselves.
The fact that they're closed source means knock-offs can't copy the internal design and will be crap. The only thing required for an open-source IoT company to lead is to persuade us that knock-offs will be crap too (e.g. "uncertified", then spread stories about knock-offs exploding, or shorter length of life, or other leaks of PII, or illegal). The rest of open-source is a huge competitive advantage for relevance in the long term, ecosystem, customer recognition, etc.
Knives are quite open-source but we still buy €200 knives from time to time.
"Knives are quite open-source but we still buy €200 knives from time to time."
The exact metallurgical details (chemical composition, manufacturing process) of high-end knives are closely guarded trade secrets. Making greats knives requires a lot of research, knowledge and experience, it's not something every joe schmoe with 100k can start a business in.
'Open source' is just not a competitive advantage. I have a drawer full of junk whose main selling point was 'it's open source!' to prove it. Starting from an open source project gets you 90% of the functionality; the other 90%, you have to do yourself. In the mean time, the 'community' (read: the 5 guys on your mailing list/forum who shout the loudest) demand that the 'company' 'gives back' (by sponsoring, blog posts on every minute detail, hand-holding everybody with a 5-line patch, ...) because now you're making money off 'other peoples' work'. But the moment you commit any code you wrote, there are a dozen Chinese (and non-Chinese) vendors who will take what you made and put it into their own product; which is usually just one of dozens; they are smart and diversify. In the mean time, you are left fighting the marketing game where you essentially have to convince every single customer to pay a 20, 30, 100% markup for - what really? Being the one who 'wrote it first'? Good luck. The Kickstarter graveyard is full of dreams like this.
Hardware is relatively difficult to knock off well. And with hardware, manufacturing quality is a huge point. Are their cheaper round Wi-Fi thermostats than Nest? Absolutely.
...I have yet to see a single one that even compares on build quality. And it's not like you can't take one apart and see how it's designed.
