Open Hardware

I'm a bit late to the party (as this has been out a while), but I caught an article on the New York Times yesterday about the Neuros OSD. It's a piece of hardware for ripping media and saving it in MP4 format. The news is that the manufacturer has made it 'open' and encourages people to write additional software/add-ons for it. I have been surprised, given the amount of hacking going on around the iPhone, Xbox and PSP that more manufacturers haven't adopted this approach, so they end up with devices that do way more than they were first designed to, without having to incur development costs.