For most of the last fifteen years, the burden of proof on open hardware was technical. Could you actually build a research-grade instrument in the open, with documentation good enough that a stranger could replicate it, and have the resulting data stand up? That was a real question and for a long time the honest answer was “sometimes, in some domains, if you’re lucky in your maintainer.” It isn’t a real question anymore. OpenFlexure microscopes are in clinical and teaching settings on multiple continents. White Rabbit came out of CERN and ended up as infrastructure far outside physics. There are environmental sensing platforms, sequencing tools, and lab automation rigs that are open, documented, and in daily use by people who have no particular ideological commitment to openness and just needed the instrument.

Once you accept that, the question changes. It stops being “can this be built” and becomes “can a university buy it, can a funder sustain it, can a standards body recognize it, can the person who maintains it get tenure.” These are procurement problems and incentive problems and accounting problems, and the open hardware community is much less practiced at them.