@Elf_Tablet You are sounding like a petulant teenager stomping off from the argument when no-one is taking your side. There is a very good reason for that, in that you are confusing NDAs with embargoes, neither of which are in any way harmful. NDAs help companies - even open source ones - handle the research they have paid for in a financially beneficial manner. Embargoes do something similar but with short term effects.
If we took your model, Ultimaker and Lulzbot to name but two would rapidly go out of business. That’s a fact of commerce today.
Even in what I refer to as Economy 2.0 - i.e. the open source business model - companies have to be able to defend their IP otherwise they end up spending loads of money on research only to find some other company cloning their product without having to pay for the research. That makes no sense at all.
I think this confusion really reaches into the heart of what open source for hardware really means. Unlike software, where a simple mistake can be correct by a few strokes of the key, a hardware “bug” can mean throwing away a set of tooling that cost several thousand monies to produce. You need a way to recoup the losses made in research.
Also, unlike the software world, open source hardware rarely has volunteers working on tweaking the designs and bla for the simple reason that the whole concept is currently unworkable in hardware.
In software one can upload a patch. compile in a matter of minutes, test and then throw it out. In hardware, that “patch” might represent many hours of printing or machining, and will often require tools and materials that volunteers do not have access to or can afford.
The idea of open hardware, in my opinion, is not to give the hardware away “free”, but to allow you to tweak, fiddle and tinker with the product you have purchased or have made for yourself from those designs.
If, for example, you bought an open hardware washing machine, you could change the wash cycles to suit your particular family, create your own wash cycles, modify it to use ultrasound or whip cream. It all starts, though, with you buying the machine in the first place. How was that machine developed? That’s right, by spending money on development, which they now need to recoup.
There is nothing wrong in owning IP. There is nothing wrong with making a decent profit. There is nothing wrong with keeping some secrets within your business. If you are smart, however, you give your customers every scrap of data they need to maintain and befiddle the products they now own to their heart’s content. That’s the most important part of open hardware. Empowering the buyer with all the info and then letting them actually fiddle.
There is no money to be made in throwing away your IP and then letting your competition take it all at no cost. In that crazy world, no research beyond the hobbyist level can ever be undertaken.
All in all, you need to re-think your idea of open hardware, as do many people.