According to to Phil Torrone, designer at Adafruit industries the market for open source hardware topped nearly $50million last and is heading towards 1B$ in 2015.
This update was given at O’Reilly Foo Camp East in the beginning of May. Torrone also explained that we have 300 significant open source hardware projects in development now and that 13 companies make the bulk of revenues (>1M$ each)
Looks a bit weird to see Makerbot in the list!
The presentation, given at Microsoft’s North East Research and Development (NERD) Centre […] Limor and Torrone ran through what they believed were the top 13 commercial companies in the space, all with revenues of approaching or over $1million: Adafruit, Arduino, Bug Labs, Chumby, Dangerous Prototypes, DIY Drones, Evil Mad Scientist Labs, Liquidware, Makerbot, Maker Shed, Parallex, Solarbotics and Sparkfun Electronics.
old news… this talk was given around 2011