7 ms·

Arduino.cc and Arduino.org have settled their differences

157 points by daker 10y ago

aceperry 10y ago
This is huge news. Glad to see a sleazy offshoot reconciling with the open source community. They originally hijacked the name and tried to strong arm a lot of businesses, which seemed to hurt the arduino community. Even though it was the biggest and most influential hobbyist electronics environment, there have been other mcu based environments popping up. Some were offshoots, such as TI's Energia, which added some innovative elements like an RTOS. Hopefully, the arduino environment moves forward even faster from now on.
- TheShadowRunner 10y ago
  Sleazy offshoot? Could you give me some examples; genuinely curious about it.
  - aceperry 10y ago
    It's kind of detailed and murky, but I dug up a couple of links to look at: http://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the-reasons-for-a-choice/ http://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the-... http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/ http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/ For a long while, most people didn't understand the turmoil in the arduino market. The competing arduino.srl tried to fork the ide and even the history of the project. Here's a direct statement from Banzi Massimo: http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
  - vurpo 10y ago
    There was originally a company called Smart Projects SRL. They manufacture boards. Arduino LLC was the company originally founded for the Arduino project, and Smart Projects SRL manufactured the actual boards for them, because it's owned by one of the Arduino project founders, Gianluca Martino, and they were all friends. That's the backstory. But when Arduino LLC tried to register the Arduino trademark, it turned out Gianluca Martino had registered the trademark for his own company two years prior, and not told the others. (Arduino LLC got the trademark in the USA, but were not able to register it anywhere else) This happened in 2008. At the time, they just agreed to stay friends and not make a big deal of it. Then, last year, Smart Projects SRL made a big deal of it. They renamed their company Arduino SRL, registered arduino.org and cut their ties to Arduino LLC. This was reportedly because LLC wanted to start licensing the name to other manufacturers, but SRL wanted to keep official Arduino manufacturing to themselves. This led to the arduino.cc/arduino.org split. That's pretty sleazy and anti-open source of them if you ask me.
    - makomk 10y ago
      If I remember correctly, Gianluca Martino's trademark registration actually predated the existence of Arduino LLC, because originally there was no company founded for the Arduino project - it was some kind of joint venture between Gianluca Martino (manufacturing, capital) and Massimo Banzi (board design).
  - xythobuz 10y ago
    For anyone interested in the history of Arduino, definitely read The Untold History of Arduino: https://arduinohistory.github.io https://arduinohistory.github.io I think it's really appaling how the original inventor is (not) credited.
    - aceperry 10y ago
      Here's an article on the topic: https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-arduino/ https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
    - makomk 10y ago
      One of the more interesting side-effects of this is that, because the Arduino libraries were written by someone else, no-one involved in the project had any experience of porting them to a completely new architecture. As AVR has gradually become slow, outdated and expensive, this has had the result that unofficial Arduino-compatible boards like Teensy are often better ports than the newer official boards.
- ingenieros 10y ago
  In all fairness both sides seem to have engaged in sleazy behavior throughout the years. To me this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees. Somebody already posted the story of Hernando Barragán so now I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner resellers: http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-arduino-any-more/ http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-ardu...
  - aceperry 10y ago
    "this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees" I don't see it that way, especially when you consider how the whole trademark issue went down. And then refusing to pay royalties and strong arming Arduino suppliers. This was not a simple personal disagreement, but overtly hostile and aggressive business moves which hurt the community. To your point, Hernando Barragán has legitimate grievances, but that was not the main problem that was resolved.
  - uola 10y ago
    > I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner reseller When Arduino split Arduino SRL, with the factory in Italy, were the ones with the Arduino trademark in most markets outside the US. Arudino LLC therefor could, presumably, only sell and manufacture device in the US. It seems reasonable that the companies licensed to manufacture Arduino in the US, and can't manufacture anywhere else nor sell to the rest of the world, shouldn't have to compete with Genuinos that are manufactured in China. In regards to Wiring the project was open source, a master thesis and lives on to this day. It's just that Arduino is more successful. You can surely doubt the professionalism of many people involved in Arduino, but more than that what happened here is that Arduino forked Wiring and Pimoroni found it cumbersome to sell Arduinos. People always say they want open source or more community driven companies, but when things get complicated not only are people quick to turn on them (which is many times understandable) but they make the situation worse trying to pile on all the things they feel are bad to justify their feelings.
- SixSigma 10y ago
  My favourite is https://Mbed.org/ https://Mbed.org/ You can write code for the devices in the browser and auto-include the C++ classes from other projects. (or you can do it all offline with GNU tools)
Animats 10y ago
So this means the two feuding Auduino sides have made up, or merged?
- soneil 10y ago
  "yes" (in theory. I believe actions speak louder than words, so that's what I'm waiting for.)
- ComputerGuru 10y ago
  Didn't you just rephrase the headline?
  - coredog64 10y ago
    I vote for using the Berkeley Document Summarizer[0] on all submissions. [0] https://github.com/gregdurrett/berkeley-doc-summarizer https://github.com/gregdurrett/berkeley-doc-summarizer
- Negative1 10y ago
  It's a 30 second read; you should just click on the link. If you really are that lazy; arduino.cc and arduino.org settled their dispute and have setup a holding company to organize device sales using he Arduino brand. In a addition, a not-for-profit company is being setup to run the educational part of the organization. I'm assuming this fixes all the B.S. that was the "Genuino" fiasco. Good riddance but the brand has been severely damaged by their scorched earth tactics with devices like the Raspberry Pi gaining amazing traction. It will be interesting to see if it can recover.
  - kogepathic 10y ago
    > It will be interesting to see if it can recover. Ardiunos were fantastic in their time, but the industry has moved on. Why work on an 8-bit MCU where you [mostly] have to bit bang IO when you can buy something like an STM32 which has hardware acceleration (DMA) for IO, and on higher models even adds things like an RTC? Arduino has a great community, but there are far better choices available now, which are even Arduino compatible (e.g. Teensy) for the same price, but that use an ARM core instead of AVR. Arduino now is a dead end. ARM ate the world, and it's now the better choice for new projects. Unless there's a need to support legacy designs implemented with Arduino, I see no compelling reason for people to continue to use them.
petrikapu 10y ago
It took only dipping sales and community looking for alternatives
- digi_owl 10y ago
  Yeah i think the RPi and clones helped a great deal there.
  - glenndebacker 10y ago
    I personally think in this space that they experiencing more competition from boards with the ESP8266. You could use the rpi with the gpio pins but for some projects it doesn't make economically sense. For 4 euro's and less you can buy a board with the ESP8266 and you can even use the Arduino IDE to program it.
    - bborud 10y ago
      Buy them on Aliexpress and they are even cheaper. You can now buy a ESP-12E for about $1.60 on Aliexpress. That's just the module though. If you want a breakout and a USB port they cost $3-4. And yes, I think the squabble left people a bit unsure about Arduino and then they discovered that there's ... the confusing mess that is mBed :-)
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I agree. I've seen ESP8266 referred to as "the better Arduino", "the new Arduino", etc. for the past several months. Of course the implicit assumption here is that people will get breakout boards like NodeMCU.
      - gh02t 10y ago
        It's not that he ESP8266 is fully a replacement and there are still lots of situations where you would lean towards the Atmel chips in the Arduino or others like PIC and STM. E.g. the ESP8266 is pretty limited on IO, not as tolerant of higher voltages, more heat/power, worse for sensitive real-time applications, inferior low-power performance and so on. But for a lot uses they are a better fit. The ESP8266 is a right time and right place kind of thing - it has enough IO and wifi to be really useful for the hobby explosion of IoT stuff.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Thank god, the whole mess is finally over, and we can get back to buying Arduino products if we want them without any hassle.
bsder 10y ago
Presumably Atmel getting bought by Microchip terrified both camps enough that they decided they needed to be unified.
- drewm1980 10y ago
  Oh wow, I didn't know about that merger... that is way bigger news than the squabbling between the Arduino factions. Arduino hardware is pretty much just a breakout board; you can make one on a breadboard. If the bigger merged company decides it doesn't care about the niche maker market, they could kill off the line of DIP chips that IMHO defines what an Arduino board is.
canada_dry 10y ago
5.. 4.. 3.. The skeptic in me says that by next year's Faire the alliance will have unraveled. Both Massimo and Musto are passionate Italians with strong visions... and as the saying goes: too many cooks.

157 points by daker 10y ago

This is huge news. Glad to see a sleazy offshoot reconciling with the open source community. They originally hijacked the name and tried to strong arm a lot of businesses, which seemed to hurt the arduino community. Even though it was the biggest and most influential hobbyist electronics environment, there have been other mcu based environments popping up. Some were offshoots, such as TI's Energia, which added some innovative elements like an RTOS. Hopefully, the arduino environment moves forward even faster from now on.

TheShadowRunner 10y ago
Sleazy offshoot? Could you give me some examples; genuinely curious about it.
- aceperry 10y ago
  It's kind of detailed and murky, but I dug up a couple of links to look at: http://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the-reasons-for-a-choice/ http://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the-... http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/ http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/ For a long while, most people didn't understand the turmoil in the arduino market. The competing arduino.srl tried to fork the ide and even the history of the project. Here's a direct statement from Banzi Massimo: http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
- vurpo 10y ago
  There was originally a company called Smart Projects SRL. They manufacture boards. Arduino LLC was the company originally founded for the Arduino project, and Smart Projects SRL manufactured the actual boards for them, because it's owned by one of the Arduino project founders, Gianluca Martino, and they were all friends. That's the backstory. But when Arduino LLC tried to register the Arduino trademark, it turned out Gianluca Martino had registered the trademark for his own company two years prior, and not told the others. (Arduino LLC got the trademark in the USA, but were not able to register it anywhere else) This happened in 2008. At the time, they just agreed to stay friends and not make a big deal of it. Then, last year, Smart Projects SRL made a big deal of it. They renamed their company Arduino SRL, registered arduino.org and cut their ties to Arduino LLC. This was reportedly because LLC wanted to start licensing the name to other manufacturers, but SRL wanted to keep official Arduino manufacturing to themselves. This led to the arduino.cc/arduino.org split. That's pretty sleazy and anti-open source of them if you ask me.
  - makomk 10y ago
    If I remember correctly, Gianluca Martino's trademark registration actually predated the existence of Arduino LLC, because originally there was no company founded for the Arduino project - it was some kind of joint venture between Gianluca Martino (manufacturing, capital) and Massimo Banzi (board design).
- xythobuz 10y ago
  For anyone interested in the history of Arduino, definitely read The Untold History of Arduino: https://arduinohistory.github.io https://arduinohistory.github.io I think it's really appaling how the original inventor is (not) credited.
  - aceperry 10y ago
    Here's an article on the topic: https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-arduino/ https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
  - makomk 10y ago
    One of the more interesting side-effects of this is that, because the Arduino libraries were written by someone else, no-one involved in the project had any experience of porting them to a completely new architecture. As AVR has gradually become slow, outdated and expensive, this has had the result that unofficial Arduino-compatible boards like Teensy are often better ports than the newer official boards.
ingenieros 10y ago
In all fairness both sides seem to have engaged in sleazy behavior throughout the years. To me this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees. Somebody already posted the story of Hernando Barragán so now I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner resellers: http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-arduino-any-more/ http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-ardu...
- aceperry 10y ago
  "this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees" I don't see it that way, especially when you consider how the whole trademark issue went down. And then refusing to pay royalties and strong arming Arduino suppliers. This was not a simple personal disagreement, but overtly hostile and aggressive business moves which hurt the community. To your point, Hernando Barragán has legitimate grievances, but that was not the main problem that was resolved.
- uola 10y ago
  > I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner reseller When Arduino split Arduino SRL, with the factory in Italy, were the ones with the Arduino trademark in most markets outside the US. Arudino LLC therefor could, presumably, only sell and manufacture device in the US. It seems reasonable that the companies licensed to manufacture Arduino in the US, and can't manufacture anywhere else nor sell to the rest of the world, shouldn't have to compete with Genuinos that are manufactured in China. In regards to Wiring the project was open source, a master thesis and lives on to this day. It's just that Arduino is more successful. You can surely doubt the professionalism of many people involved in Arduino, but more than that what happened here is that Arduino forked Wiring and Pimoroni found it cumbersome to sell Arduinos. People always say they want open source or more community driven companies, but when things get complicated not only are people quick to turn on them (which is many times understandable) but they make the situation worse trying to pile on all the things they feel are bad to justify their feelings.
SixSigma 10y ago
My favourite is https://Mbed.org/ https://Mbed.org/ You can write code for the devices in the browser and auto-include the C++ classes from other projects. (or you can do it all offline with GNU tools)

Animats 10y ago

So this means the two feuding Auduino sides have made up, or merged?

soneil 10y ago
"yes" (in theory. I believe actions speak louder than words, so that's what I'm waiting for.)
ComputerGuru 10y ago
Didn't you just rephrase the headline?
- coredog64 10y ago
  I vote for using the Berkeley Document Summarizer[0] on all submissions. [0] https://github.com/gregdurrett/berkeley-doc-summarizer https://github.com/gregdurrett/berkeley-doc-summarizer
Negative1 10y ago
It's a 30 second read; you should just click on the link. If you really are that lazy; arduino.cc and arduino.org settled their dispute and have setup a holding company to organize device sales using he Arduino brand. In a addition, a not-for-profit company is being setup to run the educational part of the organization. I'm assuming this fixes all the B.S. that was the "Genuino" fiasco. Good riddance but the brand has been severely damaged by their scorched earth tactics with devices like the Raspberry Pi gaining amazing traction. It will be interesting to see if it can recover.
- kogepathic 10y ago
  > It will be interesting to see if it can recover. Ardiunos were fantastic in their time, but the industry has moved on. Why work on an 8-bit MCU where you [mostly] have to bit bang IO when you can buy something like an STM32 which has hardware acceleration (DMA) for IO, and on higher models even adds things like an RTC? Arduino has a great community, but there are far better choices available now, which are even Arduino compatible (e.g. Teensy) for the same price, but that use an ARM core instead of AVR. Arduino now is a dead end. ARM ate the world, and it's now the better choice for new projects. Unless there's a need to support legacy designs implemented with Arduino, I see no compelling reason for people to continue to use them.

petrikapu 10y ago

It took only dipping sales and community looking for alternatives

digi_owl 10y ago
Yeah i think the RPi and clones helped a great deal there.
- glenndebacker 10y ago
  I personally think in this space that they experiencing more competition from boards with the ESP8266. You could use the rpi with the gpio pins but for some projects it doesn't make economically sense. For 4 euro's and less you can buy a board with the ESP8266 and you can even use the Arduino IDE to program it.
  - bborud 10y ago
    Buy them on Aliexpress and they are even cheaper. You can now buy a ESP-12E for about $1.60 on Aliexpress. That's just the module though. If you want a breakout and a USB port they cost $3-4. And yes, I think the squabble left people a bit unsure about Arduino and then they discovered that there's ... the confusing mess that is mBed :-)
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    I agree. I've seen ESP8266 referred to as "the better Arduino", "the new Arduino", etc. for the past several months. Of course the implicit assumption here is that people will get breakout boards like NodeMCU.
    - gh02t 10y ago
      It's not that he ESP8266 is fully a replacement and there are still lots of situations where you would lean towards the Atmel chips in the Arduino or others like PIC and STM. E.g. the ESP8266 is pretty limited on IO, not as tolerant of higher voltages, more heat/power, worse for sensitive real-time applications, inferior low-power performance and so on. But for a lot uses they are a better fit. The ESP8266 is a right time and right place kind of thing - it has enough IO and wifi to be really useful for the hobby explosion of IoT stuff.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Thank god, the whole mess is finally over, and we can get back to buying Arduino products if we want them without any hassle.

bsder 10y ago

Presumably Atmel getting bought by Microchip terrified both camps enough that they decided they needed to be unified.

drewm1980 10y ago
Oh wow, I didn't know about that merger... that is way bigger news than the squabbling between the Arduino factions. Arduino hardware is pretty much just a breakout board; you can make one on a breadboard. If the bigger merged company decides it doesn't care about the niche maker market, they could kill off the line of DIP chips that IMHO defines what an Arduino board is.

canada_dry 10y ago

5.. 4.. 3.. The skeptic in me says that by next year's Faire the alliance will have unraveled. Both Massimo and Musto are passionate Italians with strong visions... and as the saying goes: too many cooks.