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Thanks for giving your personal experience @DrAzzy. Why do you think selling custom boards is still a viable option? Is it the board design that is the challenge, or the manufacturing that is the challenge?
I find that as an amateur, it's incredibly valuable to see others' designs so that I can learn from a high quality source, thereby avoiding rookie errors and achieving state of the art designs sooner. Do you feel there is much to be gained from seeing the board design source files over inspecting a physical board, particularly with respect to learning how to design boards?
sabrehagen
@DrAzzy
I for one don't share my design files because I sell my boards, and don't want someone else to grab my design and start competing with me.
But seriously, I've seen a lot of cases where people are selling hardware, and open sourcing the software that runs on it. You can't get people to pay shit for software unless you have something in the top 0.1%, or it's a custom job for someone. But getting your custom board manufactured and selling those works fine.
Also, often source code has pieces stolen from other people in it, so you're constrained - you may have to open source it. PCB layouts are almost always done from scratch.
I think there's also an emotional aspect, since layouts are more tightly linked to a physical thing.