Pull a Makerbot

In the open source community, the term "Pulling a Makerbot" refers to closing an open source design and making it proprietary. This term comes from the following:

Makerbot is a 3D printer company that was built upon an open source 3D printer design, RepRap. After the company became hugely successful in 2012, it closed its design and made it proprietary, stirring waves of protest in the open source community. According to one of the co-founders, Zach Hoeken, the negative consequence of the closure, in the early times of Open Source Hardware history - was to put a dark cloud on the feasibility of open source business models. As such, the closure served as a discouragement for other prospective open hardware companies. Read more about this in http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open-source-a-founder-perspective/

According to some [1], this was the undoing of MakerBot. History will tell.

There are, however, good examples of successful open hardware companies. Lulzbot, the largest fully open source 3D printer company, has been growing 400% per year since 2013 - and is from OSE's perspective the new posterchild of open source economic success.