Arduino vs. Arduino

[photon]

My guess: they are 2 partners who lost trust in each other because each thought the other was cheating him. Now it's personal.

[EEVblog]

I'm glad to see it out in the open and hope it gets wide publicity in the Maker community. That way, hopefully, the judgement of the end users will count for something and perhaps in the end be more important than the legal judgement.

The judgement of the end user community is the most powerful force in play here, but only if either sides chooses to capitalise on it. Smart Projects have buckley's chance of course, no one cares about them, they have no real name or identity in the community.
Unfortunately for Arduino.cc their lawyers will likely tell them to keep their mouth shut lest they harm the case. So this lawsuit might be their downfall in more ways than one:
- It could send them broke
- It could stop them from winning the war in the trenches where they can so easily win this

[EEVblog]

My guess: they are 2 partners who lost trust in each other because each thought the other was cheating him. Now it's personal.

Reminds me of the story of some family friends who had a dispute with their neighbor over a fence. It got personal and has since cost them well over $100k in legal fees and has gotten to the point of hiring other lawyers to sue the old lawyers for doing a bad job. 5 years on they are still engaging lawyers.... 

[mtdoc]

The judgement of the end user community is the most powerful force in play here, but only if either sides chooses to capitalise on it. Smart Projects have buckley's chance of course, no one cares about them, they have no real name or identity in the community.
Unfortunately for Arduino.cc their lawyers will likely tell them to keep their mouth shut lest they harm the case. So this lawsuit might be their downfall in more ways than one:
- It could send them broke
- It could stop them from winning the war in the trenches where they can so easily win this

Good points and I agree. I think Massimo's statement in the German Make magazine was a good start. It spelled out the facts (from his viewpoint of course) and was not inflammatory - which would risk turning some against him.

It would help if some of the other partners would speak up to reinforce his view. Tom Igoe from ITP at NYU for example.

[pickle9000]

It must be very tempting to do a brand name change. Cut your losses and get back to work.

[EEVblog]

It must be very tempting to do a brand name change. Cut your losses and get back to work.

To us who have no personal emotional attachment to it, yes. But to them I think it's really personal, they have been wronged and they want vengeance. Lawyers have obviously already sweet-talked them into thinking they can win.
They haven't given any hint they intend to give up the Arduino brand.
The other issue is that that uses may chose to boycott the Arduino brand altogether, lest their money go straight to the lawyers on both sides. Arduino.cc risk looking just as bad as Smart Projects.

[mtdoc]

Yeah but the Brand is everything! With so many cheap clones available, the branding is all they have, isn't it?  - or at least at this point.

If they quietly gave up the Arduino name and the Arduino.cc website tomorrow - I think the 99% of users who don't know about this disagreement yet would just assume that Arduino.org is the new legitimate home of Arduino.   

I think they have no choice except to put up at least a symbolic fight so that the disagreement gets well publicized. That way, if they do it right, they have a chance to win - regardless of any legal decision.

[IanB]

What is the USP of Arduino, precisely?

Is it the hardware specification and shield compatibility? Is it the programming environment and the Wiring language? Is it the easy plug and play interface to a PC without complicated programming tools?

Put another way, apart from the name (which can--perhaps--be trademarked), what is there to make money out of? Is there any IP which can be patented and licensed (other than the name)?

It seems to me that the cat is out of the bag, and I am struggling to see what there is left to fight about?

[pickle9000]

What is the USP of Arduino, precisely?

Is it the hardware specification and shield compatibility? Is it the programming environment and the Wiring language? Is it the easy plug and play interface to a PC without complicated programming tools?

Put another way, apart from the name (which can--perhaps--be trademarked), what is there to make money out of? Is there any IP which can be patented and licensed (other than the name)?

It seems to me that the cat is out of the bag, and I am struggling to see what there is left to fight about?

The way it reads to me is on one hand you have a company making boards (Smart Projects) and they want a monopoly on boards and board licensing.

The other guys seem to betting on some products but mainly on training and course materials (yet to be developed). That may be used for education and so on. They are interested on licensing but not on board manufacturing. In the long term this appears to be a better model (but what do I know?). Maybe like Olimex.

[EEVblog]

What is the USP of Arduino, precisely?
Is it the hardware specification and shield compatibility? Is it the programming environment and the Wiring language? Is it the easy plug and play interface to a PC without complicated programming tools?
Put another way, apart from the name (which can--perhaps--be trademarked), what is there to make money out of? Is there any IP which can be patented and licensed (other than the name)?

The Arduino has never been anything special or really new at all.
It's just yet another SBC, with yet another easy to use IDE, with yet another easy to use set of libraries, with yet another consistent connector interface, with yet another easy PC bootloader interface.
All this stuff has been around decades before Arduino came along, in countless products.
It just happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right mix of free marketing support (Make, plus the major OSHW players et.al), OSHW warm fuzziness, ease of use, and hence road the rise of the Maker/OSHW movement. It became the defacto standard in a "new" booming industry.

[LabSpokane]

Thanks for the link. Very enlightening to read through the legal complaint.  If they can substantiate what they state, and it does seem to fit with the history as I've seen it, then Arduino.cc is in the right - at least from an ethical standpoint. Of course whether the court sees it that way depends on the law which may not correspond with the ethics.

The law isn't about ethics, it's about the law.
And yep, it's a US lawsuit, they will both go bankrupt first unless one caves in first.

And the legal costs will likely be several million *each*.  US lawyers have found prompt settlements far less profitable than going all the way to trial, then settling literally just before the gavel falls.

Small business never really win a lawsuit. I've seen it over and over. They just implode. In this case it will be mutually assured destruction. Someone just write a nice epitaph...

[LabSpokane]

I'll add one idea. If Adafruit and Sparkfun could swing a joint development team, now could be a great opportunity leapfrog the Arduino IDE & bootloader.

Or they could move over to ARM and clean up the MBed to where it's useful.

[pickle9000]

Thanks for the link. Very enlightening to read through the legal complaint.  If they can substantiate what they state, and it does seem to fit with the history as I've seen it, then Arduino.cc is in the right - at least from an ethical standpoint. Of course whether the court sees it that way depends on the law which may not correspond with the ethics.

The law isn't about ethics, it's about the law.
And yep, it's a US lawsuit, they will both go bankrupt first unless one caves in first.

And the legal costs will likely be several million *each*.  US lawyers have found prompt settlements far less profitable than going all the way to trial, then settling literally just before the gavel falls.

Small business never really win a lawsuit. I've seen it over and over. They just implode. In this case it will be mutually assured destruction. Someone just write a nice epitaph...

Sounds like a dog with cancer, take him to the vet and get him his needle. Then you need to decide "Do I get a new puppy?"

[westfw]

The Arduino has never been anything special or really new at all.

At this point, it has valuable user community, code base, and distributor network.

I used to be on the "unix-haters" mailing list.  The idea was that after using real mainframe OSes, this "minicomputer" OS was nothing special, or new; sort of a toy.  And where are we now?

One could argue that Arduino should be a "foundation" like Raspberry Pi.   And I suppose that will remain one possible future...

[westfw]

people think OSHW is just some magical thing that can be maintained by the community, because, well, it's open source.

As an interesting example, consider the relatively large number of libraries and examples, even some on the official Arduino "playground" website, that have never been updated to even the 1.0 Arduino API standards.  "I tried to compile this example, and it doesn't work with the current IDE" is a FAQ in arduino-land.   (And while 1.6 theoretically makes it easier to add third-party hardware, it's enough different than 1.0 that I expect delays in getting various hardware working "to the current standard" as well.)

[pickle9000]

What Arduino has going for it is a name.

- Take a 20 year old and ask him what hobby electronics is. He will probably give a suitable answer.
- Take a 10 year old and ask him what hobby electronics is. He will say I don't know most often.
- Take a 10 year old and ask him what an Arduino is. I am always surprised how many kids do know what it is. It's one of things things that you make with wires.

I don't really care if it's a good system or not. I do care that it is a potential start for beginners and is popular. I'd love to see them kicking around in elementary classrooms.

[DanHamer]

It can be hard starting with any area of electronics partly because its difficult to get an unbiased opinion about what platform you should start with. Dave is right about Arduino being the right system at the right time. But its also its friendliness to beginners that make it appealing. Experienced engineers tend to take their knowledge and the tools they have for granted but imagine your 14 you don't know much and you have a PC and that's it. How are you going to get started with embedded electronics. For just $25 you can buy an Arduino and you've got every thing you need to get going. When I started with PICs it was considerably more expensive to start and there was little in the way of helpful advice.

Some people seem to have a problem with Arduino I think because its so popular and they don't get why.

Yes its not perfect but I'd say its the worst entry level development platform in the embedded world, apart from all the others.

[ralphd]

people think OSHW is just some magical thing that can be maintained by the community, because, well, it's open source.

As an interesting example, consider the relatively large number of libraries and examples, even some on the official Arduino "playground" website, that have never been updated to even the 1.0 Arduino API standards.  "I tried to compile this example, and it doesn't work with the current IDE" is a FAQ in arduino-land.   (And while 1.6 theoretically makes it easier to add third-party hardware, it's enough different than 1.0 that I expect delays in getting various hardware working "to the current standard" as well.)

I think it's an example of how not to do open source.  Things like Linux (the kernel) and gcc have worked well because of centralized control.  During the years that little maintenance was done on the Arduino core and IDE, lots of people forked/branched the code and did their own versions.   So while some people figure out which libraries work with which version of the Arduino IDE for their board, some just give up, and others fix the library so it works for them.  Such fixes are unlikely to make it into the official Arduino libraries, as very few people are going to be able to write the code and test it so it works on a Uno, Due, ...

While I prefer programming AVRs in straight C or asm, on the occasions I do a bit of code on the Arduino I cringe.  One example is the new SPI transactions support.  Instead of using the API from the due which has hardware CSN support, it kept the old AVR technique of leaving CSN control to the application.  In order for that to work with the Due hardware SPI, there's an undocumented kludge where the default CSN pin is one specifically not broken out on the due board.

I think the problem is exacerbated by the fact that Arduino is targeted at newbies who don't really know how to code in C/C++.  So after hacking around with their Arduino, they cut/paste some existing library code, make a few changes, and post it on GitHub.

[westfw]

worked well because of centralized control.

Yes, exactly.   If arduino.cc/arduino.org explodes in a fireball of legalities and ill-will, what "central control" currently exists will disappear, and being "open source" is not that much of a help in getting it back.

[igendel]

As someone who barely knew what a resistor is three years ago, and entered the embedded world through Arduino, I find these latest developments quite upsetting. Banzi et al. may not have invented the wheel, but one can't downplay their contribution just because he or she were already in this field and learned things the hard way.

Thirty or more years ago you could take radios apart to learn how they work and get introduced to electronics like that. Then some shop would hire you for your fixing skills, etc. What's the alternative today? What can you learn from taking apart a smartphone? The components are too small, too specific and advanced. Arduino re-created the hand-on experience for the younger generation.

That being said, I have my reservation about the direction Arduino took their business. They seemed to be happy to keep their fans in the gilded cage of their platform and libraries, building more complex and specific boards instead of providing opportunities for deeper learning of the essentials.

[pickle9000]

@igendel

From my perspective the issue is that you got your introduction to electronics. 

[PaulStoffregen]

The Arduino has never been anything special or really new at all.

By this logic, there's nothing special about many of the world's most successful products, which took off where predecessors failed to deliver accessibility and usability necessary for mass market acceptance.

[donotdespisethesnake]

Has anyone seen a source that presents the dispute from the view of Smart Projects / Gianluca?

Also, for those interested (not sure if it's posted here yet) here's the lawsuit https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/mad/167131/

Thanks for the words pickle9000.

On the face of it, looks like a slam dunk for Arduino LLC... but then we have not seen the defense.

The informal email chain does not prove much, except to show there should have been formally entered contracts, but that wasn't done. Organisation, and payments, done on the nod it seems.

And as the fact that Arduino LLC apparently let Smart Projects file a trademark, and then stop payments, without doing much about it, I wonder how the court view that. Technically, Smart Projects own the trademark, and have been selling "Arduino" boards without a legal challenge by the LLC until now. I would have expected cease and desist letters to everyone selling "illegal marked" boards. Arduino LLC are obviously amateurs, and it shows.

I'll agree with Dave, looks expensive.

I probably was unfair on Adafruit. It seems that the official distributors (some anyway) have not been informed about dispute at Arduno, only heard from Martino about some changes in distribution. It appears Banzi has not told anyone not to sell boards from Smart Projects, despite his talk of "fighting for Arduino".

Then I additionally discovered the history of Wiring and Arduino - Barragan's and other's work, and there are some unanswered questions over Banzi's role as supervisor, then later exploiting the student's work.

On the subject of Open Source, I don't see this as a failure of an OS business model. Arduino LLC were (are) actually doing very well with a Open Source software (IDE and libraries), and Open Source hardware. The cheap clones have not killed them, arguably they are a benefit. It's because there is now a valuable business, that the founders can afford a legal fight. The dispute is over the one thing that is not open, i.e. the trademark.

Really this is a story of a thousand small businesses where the original founders fall out over the direction of the company (and profits thereof), and end up fighting for control.

In the end then, I conclude it's best to leave Arduino #1 and Arduino #2 sort it out by themselves (or die trying). It may result in two viable companies carrying the Arduino name, Arduino(software) and Arduino(hardware). Or, a big heap and someone will pick up the pieces...

In the meantime, even according to Banzi, we should pursue "business as usual".

Ps. a final amusement from Arduino.org :

Trademarks

Would you like to report a trademarks violation? trademarks@arduino.org

[donotdespisethesnake]

Just noticed there is a statement of sorts from Federico Musto http://arduino.org/blog/1-the-new-blog/to-the-makers

[photon]

Just noticed there is a statement of sorts from Federico Musto http://arduino.org/blog/1-the-new-blog/to-the-makers

Fascinating read.