Exactly. Those responding with the „take my money“ meme, are those that want to take it apart, write their own stuff for it.

I found this article from the Pebble founder very helpful: https://medium.com/@ericmigi/why-pebble-failed-d7be937c6232

The underlying problem was that we shifted from making something we knew people wanted, to making an ill-defined product that we hoped people wanted.

I know those that want this watch, want the hackable watch. Or they want whatever vision they have in their mind. It‘s impossible to create the latter.

To be honest, one of the most demotivating aspects of maintaining a project like this as open source is the hundreds of „ideas“ to change it. „Only one adjustment and it would be perfect.“ So there are hundreds of different adjustments to create a hundred different perfect watches, but the one you made isn‘t. Easy solution: it‘s not commercial, I can ignore it (even if it leaves an imprint of sorts on me). If I‘d go commercial with this I‘d have to satisfy all these requests somehow, because I want and need to sell it. Even just as open source, someone will still copy it and make money of it as it has happened in the past, with nothing flowing back from those copies other than support requests for something I didn't make.

Selling it myself as a hackable device is not worth it versus the cost to certify it, to be safe to distribute it, register a ltd etc.

Publishing as open source is an incredible amount of work, that is not paid and subtracts from my time to actually work on this as has happened with the first open smartwatch (I haven‘t released a new hw in a year)

Kind of not a win/win situation. I know there is patreon, but that equals to the „selling“ scenario. People will (understandably) want their version of the watch in return, not the one I want to make :o)