Not OP, but I do the same, and no, not in the least. The amount of information available, even filtering for the best of the best by whatever heuristic I can choose, is vastly larger than my ability to process as a single person.
If anything, I've found that the faster I reject due to dark patterns, the better off and more informed I am. If something is truly worth learning about, it will bubble up again elsewhere soon enough.
Do you feel that a focus on dismissing and defending dark patterns is appropriate or constructive? What world are you helping construct, and what values are you supporting? Are you aiming for a world where open hardware becomes dominant and beneficial?
I feel the point was a valid red flag. This org may be more interested in marketing itself than it is in supporting open source.
Looking at their repos, we find that the designs for their robots are not public. This company is using the open core / artificial scarcity model for their hardware, while presenting themselves as a fully open source organization.
This is an organization exploiting open source for its marketing, without supporting open hardware.
This is important: Contributors looking for a real open hardware project to work on should consider looking elsewhere. If they contribute to this project, they would be contributing to a partially proprietary ecosystem. This tends to compromise the promise of Open hardware, which includes low cost replication and iteration on hardware designs.
Tldr: when an open source organization practices dark patterns, people need to hear about it. It's not a minute fact- it's a major compromise of Open source values and outcomes.
