I'm an electronics student saving money to get an oscilloscope, so I consider all options.
Being a computer Linux geek and occasional bug reporter, bugs annoys me a lot.
Perhaps smaller companies can benefit having an Open Source firmware. They do interesting lower cost Hardware, but struggle to have a robust firmware and fixing the appearing bugs. This way, there could be external contributors providing fixes too.
After all, the company sell the hardware. The software is a "necessary evil", it's better if the code is reused and developed collaboratively to provide it in better quality.