Arduino vs. Arduino

[westfw]

Of course, the nice part of all this is that since it IS all OS HW/SW, the people depending on Arduino infrastructure have alternatives even if it all falls apart.  Perhaps not GOOD alternatives, but ... better than if you were counting on the next big chip out of P.A. Semiconductors when they were suddenly acquired by Apple...

[EEVblog]

Of course, the nice part of all this is that since it IS all OS HW/SW, the people depending on Arduino infrastructure have alternatives even if it all falls apart.  Perhaps not GOOD alternatives, but ... better than if you were counting on the next big chip out of P.A. Semiconductors when they were suddenly acquired by Apple...

And that's the problem, people think OSHW is just some magical thing that can be maintained by the community, because, well, it's open source. That never happens, it always comes down to one (or a few) people taking charge and pushing the "official" development.
If both companies end up trying to develop under the Arduino brand, the entire official Arduino concept is pretty much boomed.

[dannyf]

the other three wanted to internationalize the brand and license production to other firms freely, while [Martino] and [Musto] at the company formerly known as Smart Projects want to list on the stock market and keep all production strictly in the Italian factory.

translation: money.

[nixfu]

Frankly I will support which other one supports the community and open source/open hardware.  If one of them proves to not support the open community then I will vote with my wallet and make sure I never buy any of their products.

[ralphd]

Dave why not make a rant about this ?
i think that bassimo could use your help..

Thinking about it.
The problem is that we have only heard one side of the story.
I have no reason to doubt Massimo, I think he's genuine, and from (so far) a lack of response from the other side, they aren't denying it. But still, one sided.
I can run out to bat with one side, but I have to be more careful.

I have no respect for Marchese Banzi.  After the good (but not very complicated) work the Arduino team did building on the Wiring IDE and hardware, Banzi cries foul when the Chines clones hit the market.  Besides the hypocrisy of complaining when an open source design that you copied from someone else is tweaked and mass-produced, he seems oblivious to the fact that the cheap clones probably are what made Arduino so successful.  It's crazy to think people who buy a $5 Uno clone (I've even seen some with the ch340g serial and a qfp 328p for < $3 on Aliexpress) would have bought an official Arduino branded version for $25 if the clone wasn't available.  Many of the clones are better than the official boards; some Uno clones have holes to solder a row of male headers next to the female headers.  You can get $2 pro mini clones with crystal instead of a resonator and with an AMS1117 regulator that can handle half an amp or more vs 150mA for the L05 regulator on the official pro mini.

And like other people have pointed out,  many people don't even use the Arduino IDE to program the clone hardware.  Most of the code I write is with avr-gcc and makefiles, flashed to a clone pro mini board or a usbasp board.

[photon]

I can guess that Martino and Banzi have both lawyer'd up. Legal costs don't get ridiculous until or unless the litigation begins. I doubt either has enough money for a long court battle, but are nevertheless studying their legal options. This is possibly why we have not heard from Martino yet.
 

[westfw]

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!)

[nctnico]

If it is open source you can at least hire someone to fix it for you. IMHO that is a major advantage of open source hardware and software: you can build new products based on existing designs and code. There usually is some giving and taking so the core design gets better.

[donotdespisethesnake]

For people moaning about internet rage based on third hand information, that's BS, because this is what Banzi has to say in his own words at Makezine:

This situation has been brewing within Arduino for a long time.

When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders (myself, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino) decided to create a company that would own the trademarks and manage the business side of Arduino: Manufacturers would build and sell boards, Arduino would get a royalty from them like in many other businesses, such as in the fashion world. This happened in April 2008 when Arduino LLC was founded and the bylaws of the company specified that each of the five founders would transfer to this company any ownership of the Arduino brand. At the end of 2008 when Arduino was about to register the trademark in the US and worldwide, unknown to us and without any advance notice, Gianluca’s company Smart Projects — our main boards manufacturer — went ahead and registered the Arduino name in Italy and kept this news for himself for almost two years.

After the process of registering in the US was over and our lawyer tried to extend the trademark to the rest of the world, he realised that somebody had registered it already in Italy. We (Tom, David, David, and I) were shocked and demanded explanations. Gianluca reassured us that this was done to protect our collective investment. We were friends (or so we thought), so based on this agreement we kept working together for years, received royalties while quietly trying to bring the trademark back into the Arduino company through endless discussions that dragged on while Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn’t even get a salary out of it).

As the project became more successful and sales increased, the attempts at regaining control of the Italian trademark registration became more and more difficult with larger and larger demands made to us while Gianluca effectively vetoed us from either bringing in other manufacturers or get any external investment. We made headway with Arduino creating a lot of innovation, pushing the boundaries of open source hardware, hiring a lot of talented people around the world and ultimately building an amazing community around the arduino.cc website.

Needless to say, it became increasingly difficult to work with a partner that was so reluctant to allow any significant improvement and expansion of the company. We tried for a long time to reduce the cost of products to customers but our hands were tied. Last July after another round of talks, and yet another increasing request for money, we were forced to ask our lawyers to start sending his companies letters to outline our differences and request that the trademark be returned to us. When you believe you’re talking to a friend of many years, it’s hard to deal with this. It’s saddening and heartbreaking, especially for me having spent many years speaking to this person every day for hours on the phone or in person to make Arduino what it is.

A year ago without explanation, Gianluca’s manufacturing company stopped cooperating with us and unilaterally stopped paying royalties. So if people bought an Arduino board made in Italy in the last year thinking they were supporting the project they should know that we didn’t receive any money for it despite the fact that we designed, documented, maintained and supported those products. (The other manufacturers are still by our side.)

Last November, SmartProjects appointed a new CEO, Mr. Musto, who renamed the company to Arduino Srl and created a website called “Arduino” copying our graphics and layout, claiming to have invented Arduino with no mention of us four. They even started printing this new URL on all the new boards.

The last straw came a few weeks ago when this person gave interviews to a number of Italian newspapers claiming to be the new CEO of “Arduino” and implying that I was stepping down to dedicate myself to “non profit” activities.

We were shocked and responded to their claims trying to keep the noise to the minimum and avoid damaging the community and the project.

Now the matters are in the hands of lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic and I can’t go too much into details.

For us original four it’s business as usual. Luckily, three years ago, I started expanding the ways in which Arduino supports itself: working with large corporations to advise them on how to build for the maker community, participating in international research projects, running a very successful online store. This allowed us to grow independently of board sales.

I had this realisation that as hardware becomes more and more of a commodity, business models must evolve towards services, cloud platforms, education, and the whole process of helping makers become pros.

We are working with manufacturers across the globe, we have amazing partners who are on our side, we’re launching new exciting products in the fields of education and IoT. We are very saddened that these issues have been made public to confuse the community but we keep innovating and we want to continue push the boundaries of open hardware like we have been doing for 10 years.

As usual the only real home of the Arduino community is arduino.cc and you can see on day.arduino.cc that the upcoming Arduino Day on March 28 is going to be an amazing global event during which we’re going to unveil a lot of cool stuff.

Reproduced for people unable to click on links and prefer to invent their own information. True, it's one side of the story, but you can't say it is not first hand information.

[free_electron]

It's kinda funny to read people talking about paying royalties.

What's next ? An arduino tax ? Every time you buy one of these boards you cough up the arduino tax whether you use the arduino ide or use avr-gcc ?

[westfw]

I raised the issue on the Adafruit fourm ... This is their response

Hmm.  After you essentially baited them:

A classic "non-response" response...
So basically you don't care what happens to Arduino, as long as you continue to make money?
I was hoping for something better from Adafruit, but I guess business is business. "It is what it is".

I guess some people love fanning flames...

[photon]

Reproduced for people unable to click on links and prefer to invent their own information. True, it's one side of the story, but you can't say it is not first hand information.

It seems to be carefully worded (with benefit of legal advice) to avoid slandering Martino while actually slandering him. So first hand, with a secondary legal filter.

[westfw]

It's kinda funny to read people talking about paying royalties.

Why?  That's one model for funding intellectual property (ie SW) development.  If you ever bought a 9600bps modem, the manufacturer paid license fees to three separate entities, just for v.42bis compression.  (About $15k total, IIRC.)  Similar IP issues almost did-in software file compression utiities, even though source code had been floating around the net for decades before the "problems."

A agree that asking distributors (or users) to pay royalties to one company for HW they've bought from another company is a bit ... unlikely.

[ralphd]

"Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn’t even get a salary out of it)"

More Banzi ego, combined with a guilt ploy.  Real classy.

No credit, not even a mention of Hernando Barragan, Casey Reas, Benjamin Fry and other giants...

[EEVblog]

I have no respect for Marchese Banzi.  After the good (but not very complicated) work the Arduino team did building on the Wiring IDE and hardware, Banzi cries foul when the Chines clones hit the market.  Besides the hypocrisy of complaining when an open source design that you copied from someone else is tweaked and mass-produced, he seems oblivious to the fact that the cheap clones probably are what made Arduino so successful. 

AFAIK he was complaining about the use of the name, which is completely acceptable IMO.

And like other people have pointed out,  many people don't even use the Arduino IDE to program the clone hardware.

Many != most. The vast majority would use the Arduino IDE. If it's not in the 90%+ range I'll eat my hat.

[pickle9000]

All I can say is that if the brand suffers (the name Arduino) so will the product. I have no idea how long the arguments have been going on but it sounds fairly early to me.

I'm a bit surprised there wasn't an attempt to create a true alternative brand. Although maybe there is one on standby.

When it comes to the profit making aspects of Arduino, everyone does it from the Chinese cloners, to every crowdfunding project that relies on one. Why not the designers? It keeps the thing going so I have no problem with that aspect. In fact if we see more of that I'm all for it.

[LabSpokane]

this would all be so much better with a licensed IDE that we all paid 50 or 100 bucks for so that the hardware could stay open but the platform development would be funded and live on. It's the same hard lesson of Saleae.

[pickle9000]

this would all be so much better with a licensed IDE that we all paid 50 or 100 bucks for so that the hardware could stay open but the platform development would be funded and live on. It's the same hard lesson of Saleae.

Saleae is basically a hardware design issue. The design of the early units is so simple that it was easy to clone. It is a good protocol decoder and with free products like sigrok I think that they will have to really get busy to stay in the game. sigrok is still young but at least moving reliably forward.

[ralphd]

this would all be so much better with a licensed IDE that we all paid 50 or 100 bucks for so that the hardware could stay open but the platform development would be funded and live on. It's the same hard lesson of Saleae.

The Arduino IDE is just a modified version of Wiring/Processing, so it can't be licensed.
http://wiring.org.co/

[ralphd]

I have no respect for Marchese Banzi.  After the good (but not very complicated) work the Arduino team did building on the Wiring IDE and hardware, Banzi cries foul when the Chines clones hit the market.  Besides the hypocrisy of complaining when an open source design that you copied from someone else is tweaked and mass-produced, he seems oblivious to the fact that the cheap clones probably are what made Arduino so successful. 

AFAIK he was complaining about the use of the name, which is completely acceptable IMO.

Taken at it's best, yes, he was complaining about knock-offs that copied the arduino uno down to the silkscreen.  That's still making a mountain out of a molehill.  Go on aliexpress, fasttech, dx, etc and find one of these boards he's complaining about.  All I've seen is things like Funduino Dccduino, etc advertised as "Arduino compatible" or "development board for Arduino".

And like other people have pointed out,  many people don't even use the Arduino IDE to program the clone hardware.

Many != most. The vast majority would use the Arduino IDE. If it's not in the 90%+ range I'll eat my hat.

Which, if true, supports my other point that the credit is really owned to the Wiring developers.  It directly supports the uno/328p hardware, and has been improved since the Arduino fork so that it doesn't have a dog slow digitalWrite() - with constant params it compiles to a single sbi or cbi instruction.
http://wiring.org.co/download/

[ralphd]

this would all be so much better with a licensed IDE that we all paid 50 or 100 bucks for so that the hardware could stay open but the platform development would be funded and live on. It's the same hard lesson of Saleae.

Saleae is basically a hardware design issue. The design of the early units is so simple that it was easy to clone. It is a good protocol decoder and with free products like sigrok I think that they will have to really get busy to stay in the game. sigrok is still young but at least moving reliably forward.

More than that.  I'm pretty sure the Saleae hardware was just a CY7C68013A reference design.

[LabSpokane]

this would all be so much better with a licensed IDE that we all paid 50 or 100 bucks for so that the hardware could stay open but the platform development would be funded and live on. It's the same hard lesson of Saleae.

Saleae is basically a hardware design issue.

It's a not understanding of where the value of of your work is issue.

[LabSpokane]

this would all be so much better with a licensed IDE that we all paid 50 or 100 bucks for so that the hardware could stay open but the platform development would be funded and live on. It's the same hard lesson of Saleae.

The Arduino IDE is just a modified version of Wiring/Processing, so it can't be licensed.
http://wiring.org.co/

Which is why the whole open source / free love thing is poor model. These things always blow up and get abandoned. Somewhere between free and a $3000 license should be the accessibility and simple tool chain of the Arduino and the stability of a company that gets paid for doing good work.

[george graves]

Hmmm.  I wonder if arduino.cc could switch to a donation model for the IDE and only focus on that?  I'd pay.  And to be honest, the IDE really could use some work. I always felt that they were taking profits over IDE improvements in the past.  (And while I'm at it, stop it will all the new boards, focus on what you do best) My 2 cents.

[pickle9000]

It's funny how things catch on. Arduino itself could die altogether (I'm not saying they will) but I bet the "shield footprint" would not. That weird pinout is on everything.

One thing is for sure to continue on they have to expand the product. That may take the form of an learning system for micros to be used in schools, hardware, whatever. I do believe that any product needs to be pushed, you stop and it dies.