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Jason Kridner, founder of BeagleBoard.org, and Andrew McPherson, cofounder of Bela and professor at Imperial College London, build the platforms that other hardware companies build on. Jason started Beagle inside Texas Instruments to give open source software a capable ARM board to run on. Andrew built Bela because no laptop could deliver the sub-millisecond audio latency a musical instrument needs. A decade later, Bela's newest product runs on a PocketBeagle 2, the company runs out of a research lab in London, and Beagle ends up inside Europa rover prototypes at JPL and data acquisition at Fermilab.

In this conversation, Jason and Andrew talk about why exposing the layers underneath your product builds a more durable platform than hiding them, what happens to a brand when its veneer gets thin, and how a small team responds when its community starts asking for things the platform was never designed to do. Jay Patel, CEO of Amtech, takes the closed-source perspective. He explains why his shop builds on top of open hardware ecosystems even when none of his own work goes back into them, and what open foundations lower for an OEM trying to build something that lasts.