I can't really see how Arduino LLC can survive, if Arduino SRL are selling boards and not giving royalties to the LLC. Really, they "have them by the balls" which is probably an Italian expression.
I see the opposite.
Arduino SRL might be selling boards, but it sounds like they have no plans to actually do anything else, and their name is basically mud. And they only have the trademark in Italy. The only thing they have going for them are the established channels and the Italian Trademark. And I'm willing to bet that the Italian market is tiny compared to the rest of the world.
Arduino LLC on the other hand have:
- The trademark in every other country
- All the big names and the public figure head in Massimo Banzi.
- arduino.cc and the whole community around that.
- They control the development
All they need start doing is selling their own boards and they are back in business.
When it comes to funding a legal fight, which could drag on for a year or two, they (LLC) will simply run out of money. It's the LLC that develop the IDE and run all the community stuff.
That is why they should instantly start doing something real about.
Go to the community and the major distributors like Adafruit and Sparkfun etc and plead that they are going to go out of business unless people and dealers back them.
Start a marketing campaign dissing Arduino SRL (which they have effectively already started) and hammer it home to everyone that they are a cop-out commercial arm that don't even deserve the the .org domain name. Make it front and centre on your website and keep it there until the other guy goes out of business.
Start giving new boards trademarked names if you have to and only having the software officially support those from now on.
If Arduino SRL don't have the trademark rights outside of Italy then start a fight actively engaging distributors who sell their products outside of Italy.
It's not obvious who will get control of the trademark, the judge will not rule on what agreements were in place between founders, only what legal entity had prior use of the mark. That could rule in favour of Arduino SRL.
I thought Arduino LLC have it in the US and other places and have actively operated on it for years. Surely that can't be taken from them?
Although Arduino has a lot of users, there are vanishingly few developers. And of those, many would like to see a lot of technical changes (connector spacing!). In order to maintain a viable project, it needs a central authority to oversee it. Otherwise, it will fizzle out into numerous incompatible forks, or will simply decay. Leaflabs Maple is an example of that.
Exactly, and that is why I see Arduino LLC having the upper hand here. They are the developers.
It probably doesn't need saying, but the Arduino team are obviously amateur businessmen, and have made a lot of management mistakes over time. They let it drag on to a point it is now out of control, they should have nipped it in the bud.
Yep, I'm amazed they let it go on this long. And even now they seem to not be taking it by the horns but sitting back thinking "she'll be right".
They would be better rebranding as "Real Arduino" and simply get on with it, rather than wasting money on what is largely a point of principle. I think a real business person would follow the rule "be ruthless or be pragmatic".
Yes, I would instantly withdraw all lawyers, switch brands somehow, and start making your own trademarked boards. The community will follow the developers, not some maker who quite frankly now look like complete douches (even though we haven't heard both sides of the story).
Although, I am coming to the conclusion that Open Source Hardware is an impossible business model to keep going. I was probably naive to think otherwise.
It can work, but it seems not once the scale becomes big enough. But that's not that surprising.