John Boxall posted this to Google+ and I thought it would be of interest to Soylentils:
Apparently there has been a split in the community behind the hardware side of the Arduino boards, with one long-time member of the team apparently being the major driver behind the split. There's a lot more detail in Boxall's editorial as well as his comments.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 24 2015, @12:48PM
I have to take issue with this summation in the editorial:
Well, that's all fine and good if you're already a millionaire to begin with, or you have a rich uncle who's backing you all the way, but here in the real world taking those steps involves hiring lawyers who will drag their feet and suck the life out of you every chance they get. Then, even if you have paid lawyers to do all that stuff for you, it only takes a bigger player with deeper pockets to come along, decide they like the "nice little business you got there" and drag you through the courts on patent fights until you're bankrupt.
So, no, hiring a bunch of lawyers to do all that stuff is not the "great lesson" to be learned. Being very careful about the people you choose for your team is.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by Katastic on Friday April 24 2015, @01:07PM
A good lawyer makes you money. If you don't have a lawyer, you're not a professional.
--Mike Monteiro
[source] [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Friday April 24 2015, @01:42PM
I disagree with it for a different reason.
It's open source. What IP or copyright is there to protect and from who?
The real fight is over the trademark. If they registered the trademark then they registered it. End of story. The real problem isn't that they didn't lawyer up enough, it's that they didn't register the trademark in all the countries they planned to do business in.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by That_Dude on Friday April 24 2015, @01:07PM
To Wit: We are all corporate whores - the pie is split and we want our share too.
Makes me feel like I need a shower for reading the article!
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrGuy on Friday April 24 2015, @01:34PM
The Arduino vs. Arduino split and legal wrangling was covered here previously: http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=15/03/13/1420208 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by Leebert on Friday April 24 2015, @02:20PM
I give 3:1 odds that Arduino will win.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by goody on Friday April 24 2015, @03:19PM
I have to disagree with some things in the summary and the editorial. Maybe this in nitpicking, however there is not a split in the community, but in the core Arduino development team, and it doesn't even appear to be due to differences in direction or architecture. It's one member deciding to opportunistically take advantage of an arrangement because he could ad it would apparently benefit him and his company. I think clear his intentions were not good when the royalties issue came to light.
The editorial mentions this could be the beginning of the end of the project. I doubt it. The core Arduino development team is continuing on and will find other hardware manufacturers. It's the software and the community which is Arduino, not a board manufacturer. As evidenced by the array of copycat boards, many from China, and partnerships with companies like Adafruit, the hardware manufacturer can be fairly easily replaced. The creativity and community behind the project can't. Even if Arduino LLC went belly up tomorrow, the IDE, AVR bootloader, and hardware designs are all open source and would undoubtedly continue on, and we would see Adafruit and others carry the torch.
Something that really needs to happen is resellers take a stand and not sell Arduino SRL products. There seems to be a "we'll sell whatever our customers will buy" mentality. Tronixlabs seems to dance around this a bit, and I believe MakerShed was doing the same. We need to get other big resellers like Mouser and Digikey to dump Arduino SRL.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday April 24 2015, @06:05PM
I agree with this. All the boards I've bought have been official ones, including two this last year, because I wanted to support the people who have made these things available to me. But now I find out that those royalties haven't been paid in 12 months, which means I was cheated -- I thought the extra I paid helped out the project as a whole, and now I learn it is just contributing to one person's bottom line. Until this issue is resolved, I'm just buying cheap clones.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday April 24 2015, @10:07PM
The SparkFun RedBoard is a good choice if you want to support Arduino.cc. They contribute a portion back.
I have one and a couple "official" Unos. They're close enough that most projects can use them interchangeably. The biggest differences is that the RedBoard uses an FTDI USB serial chip, a surface mounted ATMega, and has slightly looser connectors (which hasn't been a problem).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bryan on Friday April 24 2015, @04:25PM
I just wish one of them would change their name to something that I can pronounce.
(Score: 1) by logan on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:21PM
An English speaking could pronounce Arduino "r-doo-ee-no". In case you wonder about the name: Some of the founders used to meet in a bar named after Arduin of Ivrea [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 25 2015, @11:24PM
Of course I meant "An English speaker" - sorry, long day.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Saturday April 25 2015, @02:08AM
"Something is happening with Arduino. Here's the link."
You couldn't have spent even one sentence even vaguely pointing at what's going on other than "hardware"?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"