Well ... my company (SUN) posted the sparc cpu specs as GPL (older versions), the solaris now have brother called opensolaris ... so .. there's potential in the idea (ok, who knows what will happen now as oracle purchased us but ..) ...
I spoke with Iain from
BitsFromBytes and he told me they plan to release the schematic for the v3 controller board and firmware source as some open source licence, they are still thinking between GPL, reativeCommons - NonCommercial or something else ... still not sure what licence they will use, but from what he told me, it will be open source...
IIRC there are few "servo motor controll board" and "stepper motor controller board" GPL projects out there too ... Most of the GLP'd electronics projects I encountered so far were Atmel based (nothing with Microchip that I found) .. that might have to do with gcc available for atmel uC
Anyhow .. the open source is a great concept, especially for hobbyists, I might be biased as I do live from MySQL but really ... look at IT industry, open source speed up the web development sooooo much .. without open source, linux, apache, mysql .. we would be probably now be somewhere where we was 10 years ago .. same thing can be applied to electronics .. problem is, look around, in IT industry ppl are not afraid to share knowledge, look at elco, I bow to ppl like Nigel or audioguru but 99% of ppl with knowledge and experience keep to them selves ... on one forum I asked "where I can purchase xyz" and I got bunch of pp's ppl telling me they will "order that for me for a small fee" and refusing to give me a link to site I can order from ?!?!?!?