people think OSHW is just some magical thing that can be maintained by the community, because, well, it's open source.
The proper question is "can I maintain it
myself if the company goes away?"
Completely proprietary system with closed source software (oh, say, a cisco router.) No way. Not even if the designs and SW become available via escrow or something.
Linux system playing video on a kiosk with proprietary GPU, and fancy codecs and such (RPi)? No.
CLI-based embedded linux on a relatively well-documented base (OpenWRT on a router)? Maybe. But I can't build new hardware.
AVR Arduino? Sure!
(note that this is an individual evaluation!)