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posted by LaminatorX on Friday April 24 2015, @12:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the hard-fork dept.

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: 3, Insightful) by goody on Friday April 24 2015, @03:19PM

    by goody (2135) on Friday April 24 2015, @03:19PM (#174687)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Friday April 24 2015, @06:05PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Friday April 24 2015, @06:05PM (#174771) Journal

    Something that really needs to happen is resellers take a stand and not sell Arduino SRL products.

    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

      by sjames (2882) on Friday April 24 2015, @10:07PM (#174858) Journal

      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).