Very similar to what you just said, I suspect that a driving factor in the state of open source in hardware is that anyone working in hardware almost be definition has a large corporate backing, since producing hardware is so capital intensive (compared to software).
If that is basically a given, why publish anything for free, when you can instead charge 10k/seat in licensing?
Possibly because initially the open source software will be significantly worse than the proprietary software and thus won't get any sales, and it will only be better with a lot of contributions, but then it's already freely available and so it still won't get any sales (but might get support/SaaS contracts).
If that is basically a given, why publish anything for free, when you can instead charge 10k/seat in licensing?