Is anyone else concerned that if all of the easy money in high tech is undercut then there won't be any more profits to fund continuing innovation? As neat as something like Arduino may be, it's not exactly cutting edge technology.
It doesn't have to be cutting edge. I do some hardware/embedded SW moonlighting. Since a lot of the smaller projects seemed to have a common platform, I made a run of PC boards so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel with every new project. If I had known about the Arduino at the time I wouldn't have bothered: I'd just have used their design with my firmware and saved a bunch of time.
The point of this is to build on someone else's work. Just like I can use Apache without having to build my own webserver, I can use the Arduino design and add my customizations to it.
Or the barrier to entry for usefull ideas will be lowered.
There isn't money in making PIC demo boards - but there is lots of profitable innovation in things you could do with a PIC if a cheap demo board was available.
