hi
I think the issue is really how the project is advertised.
While I don't agree with it, if the production files are kept "closed", the Arduino team needs to say this explicitly, rather than hiding the fact by omission. The Arudino project is over two years old, and yet this discussion is the first time that any mention of the Arduino's "open hardware/closed PCB" policy has appeared anywhere on the web. The fact that the PCB's aren't open has effectively been kept secret by just not saying it.
I say that because it took me about ten months from the point that I discovered Arduino to find out that the PCB files are actually closed. In those ten months I bought Arduinos, I taught Arduino to dozens of students, I lectured on Arduino and I wrote about Arduino in Make Magazine. After I wrote this: "...since the project is open source, all the plans, code, and instructions are available online free for those who prefer to roll their own" in Make, no one on the Arduino team contacted me to say "well, actually, that's not completely true..."
Anyway. To further support the project, I talked my university into buying $5000 worth of Arduino BT for my classes, and I spread the word on Arduino, all under the assumption that "Arduino is an open-source hardware project" that could be freely reproduced. So when I found out that the PCB files weren't actually open, I was a bit taken aback. To be frank, I wouldn't have invested that much energy if I had known that you were going to keep things like PCB files closed.
The fact that production of "Arduino" is closed wasn't, and still isn't, disclosed anywhere on the Arduino site: I had to ask one of the team who told me explicitly that they wouldn't allow others to reproduce "little blue Arduinos", and that the files aren't available to produce PCB's for shipping versions. Other team members subsequently confirmed this: production of the Arduino NG, BT etc is not open.
My guess is that Arduino would not have gotten so many collaborators and supporters if you had told them that the production and the PCB files was a "closed" affair. That just doesn't have the same cachet as "Arduino is an open-source hardware project".
Then I began to notice that this is an intentional strategy to prevent others from producing "little blue Arduinos". The PCB files for the shipping version aren't on the site anywhere! The schematics that are released are also usually out of date, or a few versions behind. Schematics for shipping versions are provided as PDF files, not Eagle .sch files that would promote reproduction; there's no production information, no gerbers no eagle files for shipping versions. And perhaps most importantly, until now, there has never been never been a mention or an explanation of the closed nature of the PCB files. Requests for Eagle PCB files in the forum go unanswered by the team.
That's not a strategy that's good for open-source projects: it's basically the same as the commercial approach to hardware. I tried again to get clarification on this from some Arduino team members, and this time the message got clearer: we will not allow anyone else to make "little blue Arduinos" that look like ours or use our name. Derivatives are OK, but the hardware franchise for "little blue Arduinos" is exclusively ours, and no one else is permitted to make them. That's an extremely commercial approach: protect your brand identity by controlling the way its trademark and look are used. Yes, derivatives are OK, but we reserve the right to tell you not to use the Arduino name on a hardware product, and don't copy our official version of the "open-source hardware" .
This just doesn't jive with the advertising, or the open-source spirit that the project is founded upon and has made it so successful. The Arduino team needs to make the "open-source" terms of the Arduino project explicit. Perhaps when you have the next team meeting you could talk about clarifying this, both on the web site and in the promotional material that gets distributed. Or maybe you will just release the files, that would be much better, for the Arduino community, and for the progress of open hardware.
D