Taking an Open-Source Approach to Hardware

Calling Arduino open-source when the very core of the hardware is still proprietary is bit strange imho. A fair comparison would be if someone threw cygwin on Windows and said it to be open-source as a whole.

The Monome ( http://www.monome.org ) would be a better example of open source hardware. They provide source files to the 40h with schematics, parts lists and firmware ( http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=tech:source_files:40h ). The larger monomes are just tiled versions of the 40h. A group of monome users ported the monome to the arduino (I built myself a Arduino-based monome port). There is a great community centered around the monome

Check out http://www.opencores.org/