Dangerous Prototypes are pretty well-known in the OSH/Maker scene, I wouldn't call them "some guy". More importantly, adafruit ran it on their blog which means

Dangerous Prototypes are pretty well-known in the OSH/Maker scene, I wouldn't call them "some guy". More importantly, adafruit ran it on their blog which means it saw an even wider audience. With ChipKIT, Microchip are undoubtedly trying to get a piece of the market that Arduino currently dominates. They seem to understand that open tools/libraries is a factor there, but it seems they can't actually do too much about it. They also seem to understand that community is a major factor in Arduino's success. I took that response to be a sign they are trying that, too. Whether they'll succeed, I don't know. The market seems pretty flush with Arduino clones, copies and equivalents now. IMHO this article, "The End of the Open Hardware Cambrian Age", has some good theories about where things are headed: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2010/12/end-of-open-source-hardware-cambrian.html http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2010/12/end-of-open-source-h...