8 ms·

Oh :-( Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium

Oh :-( Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.

londons_explore 3y ago
I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  I don't doubt that they'll try, but I don't think they have the market position to pull that off anymore, not with ESP32 et al. ascendant. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with that side of the market, hard to tell.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE. And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.
    - Dork1234 3y ago
      If it isn't Arduino, then it will be MicroPython/CiruitPython and you won't even need a compiler.
      - mbanzi 3y ago
        Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.
        jazzyjackson 3y ago
        True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv) With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.
    - chasd00 3y ago
      > It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        > I get a lot of snide remarks Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days. Eg.: Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second. Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...
  - throwaway894345 3y ago
    Pretty sure the "Arduino ecosystem" is more than just the boards. It's also a bunch of libraries that provide a standard interface to a bunch of different hardware as well as tooling to build, flash, and monitor those libraries. While I don't love those libraries or tools, they do a half-decent job of papering over the shockingly painful esp-idf (the equivalent libraries for ESP32 boards) which I understand to be one of the better embedded SDKs.
    - crote 3y ago
      The problem is that they aren't the only business in town anymore. A lot of the hobbyist stuff is moving to MicroPython / CircuitPython, PlatformIO is eating the more hardcore market, and professionals will just stick to whatever RTOS & HAL they were already using.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      I forsee they'll make all those libraries and tools free for hobbyists - and maybe even 'less than free' - ie. "We'll send you a free dev board if you download the IDE!". But if anyone tries to ship arduino code in a commercial product, they'll want royalties. Or if any microcontroller maker wants to be supported by the ecosystem, they'll also want royalties. And the royalty levels will be low because there are competing ecosystems of tools - but across such a huge market of embedded commercial electronics, I think they'll still do very well.
      - mbanzi 3y ago
        If you respect the open source license , you're free to use the Arduino code in products. We offer a licensing scheme for companies that want to license the hardware designs to use in proprietary products. The IDE is there, it's free, it's more powerful than ever and it supports any architecture the community wants to work on. Free, no royalties no licenses etc
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    The idea of getting 10% of ESP32 revenues sounds pretty funny to me. Based on how absurdly cheap I can buy the assembled boards and have them shipped across the globe, I imagine the margins are razor thin on those anyways. And if they raised prices, I'd move to other products.
- datpiff 3y ago
  I don't think this likely. In professional environments no one uses the Arduino IDE. Hobbyist projects don't move the needle in chip sales.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    > In professional environments no one uses the Arduino IDE I disagree. In companies with an embedded software team, no. But in companies where software isn't a focus of what the company does, there are plenty of bits of arduino code shipped on millions of devices. For example, my Beko branded fridge (they sell 3 million fridges per year). And my unbranded motion-sensitive security light.
    - usrusr 3y ago
      And this is where the brand comes in: "let's try to do it in-house this time, instead of hiring those embedded-mercenaries again. Arduino was originally designed for people even more clueless than us" Arduino had more impact at making people aware that tinkering with controllers might be fun (or profitable) than the actual amount of tinkering with Arduinos (or clones) suggests. Aiming for that "not the core job description" subset of professionals seems like a very good match.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
        Not only that, but the popularity of the ecosystem opens up the feasibility of projects that would otherwise not be considered. As a professional embedded systems engineer, I'm not the "ideal Arduino customer." But having the arduino ecosystem available means that I can build a one-off for a client in a matter of minutes when it would otherwise take days or weeks. That means I become the "embedded mercenary" that they like and want to hire again :-)
  - mbanzi 3y ago
    Actually there are 21000 companies that have bough our products and 2000 of them just the professional tools... so the situation is very different
- RobotToaster 3y ago
  They've taken money to add support for new chips before, from intel of all people.
- mbanzi 3y ago
  Hi (co founder of Arduino here) We're not doing any of that. Our partnerships based on products and whatever processor is the most useful for what we're trying to build. We're mostly working on robust industrial products that maintain the ease of use of the Arduino framework and we sell those to enterprises. very simple
  - malfist 3y ago
    Not doing any of that _today_. VC's don't like to leave money on the table, and there's a long history of companies going back on their promises to their users in the years following accepting VC money.
    - Ndndjdndj 3y ago
      [dead]
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    pinky promise ;)
  - gustavus 3y ago
    The turkey got to the farm. The Chickens all told him to fear the farmer, that one day the farmer would kill and cook and eat him. When the farmer came the first time the turkey hid full of fear, but the farmer came and instead of death and fear brought food. The farmer took care of the turkey, feeding him well, making sure he had a warm place to stay. All along the chickens warned the turkey, the farmer was going to come and eat him, but the Turkey thought. "The Farmer is so nice, he takes care of me so much and loves me, these chickens don't have any idea what they were talking are talking about. They are just foolish scared chickens", the turkey thought. Then one fateful November day instead of a bag of feed the farmer brought an axe.... Many tech people have seen this happen over and over again, they know that when the VCs come, eventually so will the axe.
    - Ndndjdndj 3y ago
      [dead]
yard2010 3y ago
And enshitification! You forgot enshitification
- mbanzi 3y ago
  Actually we're not going down that path at all. we are still doing the same things we were doing before. we have no plans for "enshittifying" our business model
  - Workaccount2 3y ago
    You're just going to put yourself in a bad spot chasing comments around online. YOU are not going down that path. But investors are now the ones shaping the paths. Arduino is hardly the first company to take on VC money. Everyone here is intimately familiar with how it always plays out, and the dynamics that will force around even the most pure hearted leader. It's best not to say anything, you are only going to look foolish trying to explain to a bunch of veteran tech heads how "This time its different!".
  - yard2010 3y ago
    Thank you for saying that, I really hope it will go the right wholesome way.
dbrgn 3y ago
To quote from the article: > After the first $32 million Series B financing received in 2022, “This investment will allow us to further fuel our transformational platform initiative for professional customers, lowering the barriers to entry in IoT and AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud,” says Arduino’s CEO Fabio Violante.
- bombcar 3y ago
  The words! They are buzzing!
  - Brusco_RF 3y ago
    Now if we could just somehow fit "web3" or "as a service" in that sentence
    - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
      Can my project be hosted on blockchain though?
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        Just invest 17 bitcoins into my wallet, and I shall transport your company to the virtual blockchain for you.
    - mbanzi 3y ago
      co founder of Arduino here) actually I hate web3 I think it's a pile of bullshit and it's slowly fading away... We've never been interested in that. We do sell services but we try to avoid bullshit terms like "servitization"
      - Brusco_RF 3y ago
        Since I've got you, allow me to apologize for all the knee-jerk cynics in this thread. I trust you will continue to ship great product and that your incentives will remain aligned with those of your users. Just pinky promise me that you won't make Arduino IDE a subscription :)
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I think you got it all wrong. VC funding makes things cool because they could afford to loose money and make product better. Enshittification starts when they stop receive VC funding like reddit or docker. Reddit was founded 18 years ago and for the first 10 years it was good because they don't have any pressure to make money.
- jklinger410 3y ago
  Every company, once they stop receiving private investment, goes public and begins to enshiffy their products. Accepting VC funding 99% of the time means that is the route they plan to go.
- tomaszsobota 3y ago
  A VC will not just sit idly when their investment starts going down the sink. They'll do what they can to influence the decision-making towards more revenue. There are exceptions, but the article is rather clear the new round comes from large-cap corporate entities.
- crote 3y ago
  You seem to forget that some businesses exist before VC funding. Arduino started out as an open-source project, with further development funded by the sale of physical hardware. They did not need tens of millions of VC funding for that, and they independently developed the "cool stuff" people here care about. Unlike most startups seen here, they were not selling stuff at a loss in the hope of conquering the world and somewhere along the way hopefully figuring out a way to make money. Arduino could've probably continued doing this for decades, but instead they stagnated and were leapfrogged by their competitors. They only need to raise VC funding in order to expand into new markets because they want to pivot towards "professional engineers with enterprise-scale applications".
  - mbanzi 3y ago
    users, especially beginners, like consistency. So you call that "stagnation" I call that "avoid adding stuff that people don't really need". We make more than 100 different products so we haven't stagnated at all.
frollo 3y ago
Given Arduino's origin and first history this is especially depressing. Good old Adriano is now well and buried.
- mbanzi 3y ago
  Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere.. The R&D on the Professional products eventually benefits everyone. I strongly disagree with your statement
  - nextaccountic 3y ago
    > They never interfere They never interfere today, but we all know what happens when money dries up and VCs want some return on their money.
  - leros 3y ago
    Glad to see you chime in here. Just curious, is Arduino setup so that the community could takeover if you did somehow go pure enterprise and abandon hobbyists? If I recall, things are pretty open source.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Everything except the name is properly opensource for the OG arduino (Arduino Uno). For some more recent boards, there are proprietary components and binary tools and blobs - notably the Expressif board packages for the ESP8266 and ESP32's. At least some of the blame for that is with the chip manufacturers and not the Arduino project.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering You're not disagreeing with parent commenter and could both be correct! > Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere At some point, they will expect, then demand returns on their investments, then your focus will mostly be on the professional offering, while the community product gets less love. It's not a condemnation of your as an individual or your organization: this cycle has played out many times via VC or acquisition.
RobotToaster 3y ago
They already abandoned open source, their newest boards (arduino pro) are closed source.
primitivesuave 3y ago
Honestly I feel like the people who made digital electronics accessible to 2nd graders deserve compensation. I used to organize and teach Arduino robotics classes, and had thousands of students over the years. A handful of those kids even went on to make science fair projects and portfolio projects with Arduino, which set them on a path to a career in engineering. Even if they completely reverse their open-source approach, I’d still be grateful for the tremendous contribution Arduino has made to education. By the way, the best way to support Arduino as an individual is to only buy official boards directly from their site.
rasz 3y ago
Arduino is not a cool little company. If you start reading about its history you will learn about some Italian dudes running PCB manufacturing for Arduino stealing trademark and registering US company with it. https://makezine.com/article/technology/arduino/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ https://makezine.com/article/technology/arduino/massimo-banz... Poor Massimo Banzi got taken advantage of, right? If you dig even deeper you will find http://arduinohistory.github.io http://arduinohistory.github.io describing how Massimo Banzi stole open source project from one of his students.
devwastaken 3y ago
Yep they're already "going pro" with new pro dev boards. Arduino hasn't been relevant since the release of the original mega. Now it's doing more damage by continuing to push an "Arduino" ecosystem separated from the realities of building production grade software.

londons_explore 3y ago

I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
I don't doubt that they'll try, but I don't think they have the market position to pull that off anymore, not with ESP32 et al. ascendant. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with that side of the market, hard to tell.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE. And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.
  - Dork1234 3y ago
    If it isn't Arduino, then it will be MicroPython/CiruitPython and you won't even need a compiler.
    - mbanzi 3y ago
      Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.
      - jazzyjackson 3y ago
        True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv) With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.
  - chasd00 3y ago
    > It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch. Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      > I get a lot of snide remarks Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days. Eg.: Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second. Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...
- throwaway894345 3y ago
  Pretty sure the "Arduino ecosystem" is more than just the boards. It's also a bunch of libraries that provide a standard interface to a bunch of different hardware as well as tooling to build, flash, and monitor those libraries. While I don't love those libraries or tools, they do a half-decent job of papering over the shockingly painful esp-idf (the equivalent libraries for ESP32 boards) which I understand to be one of the better embedded SDKs.
  - crote 3y ago
    The problem is that they aren't the only business in town anymore. A lot of the hobbyist stuff is moving to MicroPython / CircuitPython, PlatformIO is eating the more hardcore market, and professionals will just stick to whatever RTOS & HAL they were already using.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    I forsee they'll make all those libraries and tools free for hobbyists - and maybe even 'less than free' - ie. "We'll send you a free dev board if you download the IDE!". But if anyone tries to ship arduino code in a commercial product, they'll want royalties. Or if any microcontroller maker wants to be supported by the ecosystem, they'll also want royalties. And the royalty levels will be low because there are competing ecosystems of tools - but across such a huge market of embedded commercial electronics, I think they'll still do very well.
    - mbanzi 3y ago
      If you respect the open source license , you're free to use the Arduino code in products. We offer a licensing scheme for companies that want to license the hardware designs to use in proprietary products. The IDE is there, it's free, it's more powerful than ever and it supports any architecture the community wants to work on. Free, no royalties no licenses etc
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  The idea of getting 10% of ESP32 revenues sounds pretty funny to me. Based on how absurdly cheap I can buy the assembled boards and have them shipped across the globe, I imagine the margins are razor thin on those anyways. And if they raised prices, I'd move to other products.
datpiff 3y ago
I don't think this likely. In professional environments no one uses the Arduino IDE. Hobbyist projects don't move the needle in chip sales.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  > In professional environments no one uses the Arduino IDE I disagree. In companies with an embedded software team, no. But in companies where software isn't a focus of what the company does, there are plenty of bits of arduino code shipped on millions of devices. For example, my Beko branded fridge (they sell 3 million fridges per year). And my unbranded motion-sensitive security light.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    And this is where the brand comes in: "let's try to do it in-house this time, instead of hiring those embedded-mercenaries again. Arduino was originally designed for people even more clueless than us" Arduino had more impact at making people aware that tinkering with controllers might be fun (or profitable) than the actual amount of tinkering with Arduinos (or clones) suggests. Aiming for that "not the core job description" subset of professionals seems like a very good match.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      Not only that, but the popularity of the ecosystem opens up the feasibility of projects that would otherwise not be considered. As a professional embedded systems engineer, I'm not the "ideal Arduino customer." But having the arduino ecosystem available means that I can build a one-off for a client in a matter of minutes when it would otherwise take days or weeks. That means I become the "embedded mercenary" that they like and want to hire again :-)
- mbanzi 3y ago
  Actually there are 21000 companies that have bough our products and 2000 of them just the professional tools... so the situation is very different
RobotToaster 3y ago
They've taken money to add support for new chips before, from intel of all people.
mbanzi 3y ago
Hi (co founder of Arduino here) We're not doing any of that. Our partnerships based on products and whatever processor is the most useful for what we're trying to build. We're mostly working on robust industrial products that maintain the ease of use of the Arduino framework and we sell those to enterprises. very simple
- malfist 3y ago
  Not doing any of that _today_. VC's don't like to leave money on the table, and there's a long history of companies going back on their promises to their users in the years following accepting VC money.
  - Ndndjdndj 3y ago
    [dead]
- moralestapia 3y ago
  pinky promise ;)
- gustavus 3y ago
  The turkey got to the farm. The Chickens all told him to fear the farmer, that one day the farmer would kill and cook and eat him. When the farmer came the first time the turkey hid full of fear, but the farmer came and instead of death and fear brought food. The farmer took care of the turkey, feeding him well, making sure he had a warm place to stay. All along the chickens warned the turkey, the farmer was going to come and eat him, but the Turkey thought. "The Farmer is so nice, he takes care of me so much and loves me, these chickens don't have any idea what they were talking are talking about. They are just foolish scared chickens", the turkey thought. Then one fateful November day instead of a bag of feed the farmer brought an axe.... Many tech people have seen this happen over and over again, they know that when the VCs come, eventually so will the axe.
  - Ndndjdndj 3y ago
    [dead]

yard2010 3y ago

And enshitification! You forgot enshitification

mbanzi 3y ago
Actually we're not going down that path at all. we are still doing the same things we were doing before. we have no plans for "enshittifying" our business model
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  You're just going to put yourself in a bad spot chasing comments around online. YOU are not going down that path. But investors are now the ones shaping the paths. Arduino is hardly the first company to take on VC money. Everyone here is intimately familiar with how it always plays out, and the dynamics that will force around even the most pure hearted leader. It's best not to say anything, you are only going to look foolish trying to explain to a bunch of veteran tech heads how "This time its different!".
- yard2010 3y ago
  Thank you for saying that, I really hope it will go the right wholesome way.

dbrgn 3y ago

To quote from the article: > After the first $32 million Series B financing received in 2022, “This investment will allow us to further fuel our transformational platform initiative for professional customers, lowering the barriers to entry in IoT and AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud,” says Arduino’s CEO Fabio Violante.

bombcar 3y ago
The words! They are buzzing!
- Brusco_RF 3y ago
  Now if we could just somehow fit "web3" or "as a service" in that sentence
  - SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
    Can my project be hosted on blockchain though?
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Just invest 17 bitcoins into my wallet, and I shall transport your company to the virtual blockchain for you.
  - mbanzi 3y ago
    co founder of Arduino here) actually I hate web3 I think it's a pile of bullshit and it's slowly fading away... We've never been interested in that. We do sell services but we try to avoid bullshit terms like "servitization"
    - Brusco_RF 3y ago
      Since I've got you, allow me to apologize for all the knee-jerk cynics in this thread. I trust you will continue to ship great product and that your incentives will remain aligned with those of your users. Just pinky promise me that you won't make Arduino IDE a subscription :)

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

I think you got it all wrong. VC funding makes things cool because they could afford to loose money and make product better. Enshittification starts when they stop receive VC funding like reddit or docker. Reddit was founded 18 years ago and for the first 10 years it was good because they don't have any pressure to make money.

jklinger410 3y ago
Every company, once they stop receiving private investment, goes public and begins to enshiffy their products. Accepting VC funding 99% of the time means that is the route they plan to go.
tomaszsobota 3y ago
A VC will not just sit idly when their investment starts going down the sink. They'll do what they can to influence the decision-making towards more revenue. There are exceptions, but the article is rather clear the new round comes from large-cap corporate entities.
crote 3y ago
You seem to forget that some businesses exist before VC funding. Arduino started out as an open-source project, with further development funded by the sale of physical hardware. They did not need tens of millions of VC funding for that, and they independently developed the "cool stuff" people here care about. Unlike most startups seen here, they were not selling stuff at a loss in the hope of conquering the world and somewhere along the way hopefully figuring out a way to make money. Arduino could've probably continued doing this for decades, but instead they stagnated and were leapfrogged by their competitors. They only need to raise VC funding in order to expand into new markets because they want to pivot towards "professional engineers with enterprise-scale applications".
- mbanzi 3y ago
  users, especially beginners, like consistency. So you call that "stagnation" I call that "avoid adding stuff that people don't really need". We make more than 100 different products so we haven't stagnated at all.

frollo 3y ago

Given Arduino's origin and first history this is especially depressing. Good old Adriano is now well and buried.

mbanzi 3y ago
Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere.. The R&D on the Professional products eventually benefits everyone. I strongly disagree with your statement
- nextaccountic 3y ago
  > They never interfere They never interfere today, but we all know what happens when money dries up and VCs want some return on their money.
- leros 3y ago
  Glad to see you chime in here. Just curious, is Arduino setup so that the community could takeover if you did somehow go pure enterprise and abandon hobbyists? If I recall, things are pretty open source.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    Everything except the name is properly opensource for the OG arduino (Arduino Uno). For some more recent boards, there are proprietary components and binary tools and blobs - notably the Expressif board packages for the ESP8266 and ESP32's. At least some of the blame for that is with the chip manufacturers and not the Arduino project.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering You're not disagreeing with parent commenter and could both be correct! > Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere At some point, they will expect, then demand returns on their investments, then your focus will mostly be on the professional offering, while the community product gets less love. It's not a condemnation of your as an individual or your organization: this cycle has played out many times via VC or acquisition.

RobotToaster 3y ago

They already abandoned open source, their newest boards (arduino pro) are closed source.

primitivesuave 3y ago

Honestly I feel like the people who made digital electronics accessible to 2nd graders deserve compensation. I used to organize and teach Arduino robotics classes, and had thousands of students over the years. A handful of those kids even went on to make science fair projects and portfolio projects with Arduino, which set them on a path to a career in engineering. Even if they completely reverse their open-source approach, I’d still be grateful for the tremendous contribution Arduino has made to education. By the way, the best way to support Arduino as an individual is to only buy official boards directly from their site.

rasz 3y ago

Arduino is not a cool little company. If you start reading about its history you will learn about some Italian dudes running PCB manufacturing for Arduino stealing trademark and registering US company with it. https://makezine.com/article/technology/arduino/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ https://makezine.com/article/technology/arduino/massimo-banz... Poor Massimo Banzi got taken advantage of, right? If you dig even deeper you will find http://arduinohistory.github.io http://arduinohistory.github.io describing how Massimo Banzi stole open source project from one of his students.

devwastaken 3y ago

Yep they're already "going pro" with new pro dev boards. Arduino hasn't been relevant since the release of the original mega. Now it's doing more damage by continuing to push an "Arduino" ecosystem separated from the realities of building production grade software.