A solid half of my income comes from an OSHW project I started 6 years ago back when I was a student [1]. While my product hasn't been knocked off* (I suspect

A solid half of my income comes from an OSHW project I started 6 years ago back when I was a student [1]. While my product hasn't been knocked off* (I suspect the fact that I made the product affordable and provide good service and logistics to often-ignored markets such as Russia, China and South America is a big part of this), I can understand exactly how this can be financially devastating to a larger organisation like theirs. I would estimate a solid 90%+ of Arduinos out there to be clones (almost 100% outside of the EU/US markets), and the lost revenue from these clones does nothing but limit their ability to do proper QA and R&D. (Yes, one clone purchased doesn't equal one lost sale of the genuine article, but it is higher than zero.) All that said, I would be surprised if this didn't backfire. The guys in Shenzhen will take all of a week to reverse engineer a fully working clone of this, Altium files or not. Meanwhile, the genuine, paying customers will be angered by Arduino's decision and it will hurt the brand overall. As Gabe Newell quipped 10 years ago, piracy is a service problem. It can only be solved through better service and delivery/logistics. [1] https://espotek.com/labrador/ https://espotek.com/labrador/ * It has been cloned non-commercially, both by a student in Iran and a retired engineer from India. Both were very graciuous and I was happy to help them.