OK, but how many small companies will fight for 15 years to get a piece of what is really not a very large market (museums)?
The point is that price is probably not enough of a competitive advantage to topple the market leader. Given enough time anything can happen, but you have to be reasonable about what's likely.
I agree that price is not enough but I do think price/performance is. I believe this is why the consumer Linux desktop has not been as successful as enterprise Linux.
It may take 15 years for the idea of open source hardware to be accepted. Once people are comfortable that lower price does not imply lower quality I doubt that it will be a hard sell. I agree that now that may not be the case for the museum environmental sensor market but until someone try's it will not be known.
Open source software achieves its cost savings by eliminating or greatly reducing many levels of organization and overhead that exist in proprietary software vendors (i.e. sales, marketing, human resources, project management,..) not by reducing quality. Larry Augustine has a good article describing this http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=54. It is reasonable to think that the same thing could happen with hardware.
