“Why does this microwave oven cost $1500?”
“Two reasons. The first is that it has to have a full network stack to allow it to download software from competing appliance vendors. The second is the cost that the manufacturer had to bear to develop software for every single other microwave sold. There are some pretty weird architectures out there, and they had to hire a whole bunch of programmers.”
OP said “no hardware vendor”, not “ no networked hardware vendor”.