Slowing of Moore’s law, virtuous feedback cycle and ecosystem benefits cited among the motivations for making consumer products with designs that anyone can study and modify.

In a Business Impact interview for MIT Technology Review Andrew “Bunnie” Huang makes the case for hackable consumer products, noting how “The slowing of Moore’s Law means that we’re going to start encountering more infrastructure that doesn’t change.”

Huang goes on to say how “In the 1990s, it would have been crazy to keep a laptop for five years, but now I have five-year-old laptops that work just fine. [That gives you] time for an open-source community to grow because you’re not constantly chasing a moving target, and it doesn’t hurt your company as much if, within a few months of putting your stuff out there, someone starts cloning it. It’s like, “Okay, well, we’re going to be producing this for years and years anyway.” And being able to have these cloners give me ideas back, which I can then use to improve my product, is worth a lot more than me trying to sue these guys out of existence.”