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Arduino published updated terms and conditions: no longer an open commons
Previous thread: The Death of Arduino? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143
- baaron 11mo agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143
- abstractbeliefs 11mo agoArduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time. This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
- adfm 11mo agoArduino is as influential as it is controversial and has been from the beginning. https://arduinohistory.github.io https://arduinohistory.github.io https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-arduino/ https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Random09 11mo agoLooks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.
- FuriouslyAdrift 11mo agoBeagleBone has been great and is going strong
- HackerBarrel 11mo ago[flagged]
- stackghost 11mo agoIt's not cheap but I really enjoy tinkering with their RISCV boards.
- chemotaxis 11mo agoIt's a completely different thing. Single-board computer versus a microcontroller. It might not matter for some applications, but it's a major tradeoff. But the only value of Arduino is the community (and the compile-time layer of syntactic sugar, if you like it). Otherwise, it's just an expensive breakout board for a cheap chip you can buy from Mouser or DigiKey. If you know how to solder, you don't really need the board in the first place.
- KalMann 11mo agoAren't you forgetting about the software that makes it so easy and straightforward for newcomers to flash programs and experiment the microcontroller?
- chemotaxis 11mo agoFirst, the software is available whether you buy the board or not. Second, there's no real difficulty barrier, not anymore. There are point-and-click tools, free integrated IDEs, cheap programming dongles, etc. There are more tutorials for Arduino than the underlying chip, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter - but it boils down to the community, not the hardware.
- actinium226 11mo agoIt doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
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- frumplestlatz 11mo agoIt looks like they have modern options that run Linux now; it’s no longer the realm of 8-bit Atmel MCUs. I’m not sure what the value proposition is overall, though. The IDE, perhaps? I never particularly saw the draw, but it clearly met the needs of some real market niche.
- ibgeek 11mo agoMaybe two different things here: SBCs that run Linux versus microcontrollers (MCUs). MCUs are lower power, have less overhead, and can perform hard real-time tasks. Most of what Arduino focuses on are MCUs. The equivalent is the Raspberry Pi Pico. In my experience, the key thing is the library ecosystem for the C++ runtime environment. There are a large number of Arduino and third-party high-level libraries provided through their package management system that make it really easy to use sensors and other hardware without needing to write intermediate level code that uses SPI or I2C. And it all integrates and works together. The Pico C/C++ SDK is lower level and doesn’t have a good library / package management story, so you have to read vendor data sheets to figure out how to communicate with hardware and then write your own libraries. It’s much more common for less experienced users to use MicroPython. It has a package management and library ecosystem. But it’s also harder to write anything of any complexity that fits within the small RAM available without calling gc.collect() in every other line.
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- qwertox 11mo agoDo tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.
- Fairburn 11mo agoSame, esp32. Not liking the path that Arduino is on currently.
- hiddencost 11mo agoYup. Esp32 is just better.
- JKCalhoun 11mo agoI actually use Teensy. I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down. It's not bare-bones enough for many of my projects.
- ghurtado 11mo agoNo we don't. I have dozens of Arduinos that I will never use. With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more. The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993 Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"
- cptskippy 11mo agoI just made the discovery the other day that there are two Arduino IDEs, the old crusty one maintained by Arduino.org and the new hotness maintained by Arduino.cc. I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome. https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#ide https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#ide Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.
- oytis 11mo agoWhat's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
- nyeah 11mo agoFor some reason most companies never seem to realize that they will destroy their acquisitions. It's always kind of an afterthought. "Oh, right, we have to terrify the new customers and lay off the people who make the products work. Sam, take care of that, will you?" Acquisitions tend to be done in a haze of dream-state thinking. Maybe that's part of it.
- toyg 11mo agoYou're buying an established brand to augment yours, regardless of what that brand does. It's a sort of SEO. In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net
- zajio1am 11mo agoFrom Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
- oytis 11mo agoThere is no lock in, you can use avr-gcc with Arduino boards. Arduino is a portable SDK with HAL, you can add support for your own devices to it pretty easily
- zajio1am 11mo agoYes, i mean more like educational lock-in, trying to push their own tools and SDKs so people get used to them.
- oytis 11mo agoThe point is ease of use. It was designed for artists and other non-programmers originally. I've seen people who would never figure out how to use a crosscompiler do pretty cool things with Arduino.
- ghurtado 11mo agoThe lock-in is that it's a big pain in the arse to use anything but their IDE. Most vendor lock-in isn't "it's impossible to do the thing" but "it's hard enough to do the thing any other way, so this is effectively the only practical way to do it"
- MSFT_Edging 11mo agoIt's also possible to import the Arduino libs/headers and build against them with a little bit of Make. I put together a simple setup to skip the arduino ide on an AVR design, but still be able to use their serial.println and other utilities. You can use it side by side with manual register masks for enabling IO.
- whynotmaybe 11mo ago> The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied. > This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware. Yep, the complete opposite of "open".
- adhoc_slime 11mo agoarduino's response to the discourse is here: https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy-update-setting-the-record-straight/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
- M95D 11mo agoI don't trust that reply. I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation. To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.
- belval 11mo agoYour comment is/was getting downvoted perhaps because of the last line but this is very true: > It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation. Arduino is owned by Qualcomm, Qualcomm is known for being litigious. Whoever wrote that note, unless it was the CEO of Qualcomm, doesn't actually call the shots and if tomorrow the directive comes from above to sue makers they will have to comply.
- cosmicgadget 11mo agoI mean even if it came from the CEO he could change his mind tomorrow. It's maybe better to look at incentives, something that blog posts can help illustrate. Does Qualcomm want to mine the maker community for IP or get them to adopt its technology?
- mindcrime 11mo ago> I mean even if it came from the CEO he could change his mind tomorrow. To a point. Public statements do carry some legal weight, due to the principle of "Promissory Estoppel"[1]. There are limits to that though, but it's not nothing. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel
- sansseriff 11mo agoI remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this. Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders? Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
- RobRivera 11mo agoWhats the motorola ecosystem like these days? Its been a good 16 years for me
- phoehne 11mo ago15 years ago I think Arduino was the best choice for educational purposes. I still think it's a great choice now. The fact the IDE and board are basically the same as they were 15 years ago, means you can figure out how to set everything up once and focus on teaching, rather than PC trouble-shooting. Which, for basic concepts, or younger kids, is great. And if they find a 5 or 10 year old video on how to do something, it's still relevant. If I were putting teaching materials today - I would pick something like Micro python. The down side is it isn't as "canned" a solution, meaning there might be something new to figure out every so often. Which means you spend more time helping people trouble shoot why something isn't working, instead of teaching something useful. On the up side, Python is pretty much the introductory language of choice, today. With lots of available materials. That's not to say Arduino was perfect. Far from it. Just easier to do, and more consistent over time, than other options.
- colonial 11mo ago> Are there other good ways of doing it? I'm working on an ESP32 project right now, and Espressif provides shrink-wrapped toolchains for C/++ and Rust. The latter even comes with a little tool called 'espup' that cleanly installs their fork of Rust and LLVM (for Xtensa support) - I was able to compile and run a blinky in less than half an hour. See https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/ https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/ - it also wasn't too hard for me to whip up a Nix Flake with the same toolchain, if that's your jam.
- jajuuka 11mo agoQualcomm wasted no time and tanking this purchase. Not sure how the MBA's thought this would be a good idea to change everything about a project. Wouldn't be surprised to see the prices of the boards go up $200 tomorrow at this rate.
- euroderf 11mo agoYeah srsly, what's the business plan for milking the acquisition target ? The happy talk seems implausible.
- ndiddy 11mo agoThis article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS: > 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
- mrlambchop 11mo ago(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion) That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive. Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas... Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.
- st3fan 11mo agoYeah no. Wishful thinking. History has shown that huge corporations taking over open source project generally results in a big change how those projects are governed and how the legalese like t&c turns out. Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.
- deleted 11mo ago
- mlindner 11mo agoThis was already covered in the previous thread you mentioned. Just merge the threads.
- macintux 11mo agoDang added the previous thread to the description. I don't know why he didn't merge them.
- jcalvinowens 11mo agoIs Arduino actually used for anything serious? While I certainly appreciate how their whole ecosystem has made working with microcontrollers more accessible... even the most casual hobbyists I know very quickly move on to something like an ESP32.
- teo_zero 11mo agoPlease, before commenting on this article, be sure to read Qualcomm's reply posted by adhoc_slime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007805
- lysace 11mo agohttps://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide https://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 Who does the fork? Paging e.g. Adafruit and Sparkfun.
- tonyhart7 11mo agoQualcomm would force arduino to focus at enterprise offering its happy ending for both investor
- franky47 11mo agoSad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago. I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.
- nofunsir 11mo agoI see Gianluca Martino let arduino.com lapse/is squatting it. Maybe the experiment is done? Is Adafruit no longer #TeamArduinoCC ?
- ptorrone 11mo agogood find, i can say that we are (adafruit) always #teamopensourcearduino which is what cc _was_
- LandoCalrissian 11mo agoQualcomm blew this up in record time, impressive stuff.
- shevy-java 11mo agoThat's sad. Perhaps a fork may be created, but right now I think it is true that arduino is dead. Guess we need an alternative now.
- manchoz 11mo agoArduino official response - https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-service-and-privacy-policy-update-setting-the-record-straight/ https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
- mindcrime 11mo agoColor me skeptical, but I did just order a Uno Q a couple of days ago, right before all this T&C news broke. So I guess I'll still spend at least a modest amount of time fiddling with that when it arrives. That said, I definitely have some severe reservations about the path that Arduino is on, especially given Qualcomm's history. Old aphorisms like "The leopard doesn't change its spots", and "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" weigh heavily in mind right now. As does the parable about the scorpion and the frog.
- jxm262 11mo agoSame :) I haven't touched electronics since college and the Uno was pretty cheap. No regrets though, just want to hack and learn on something.
- _giorgio_ 11mo agoArduino merda.
- talideon 11mo agoWell, I'd say the Qualcommisation of Arduino is happening as expected and apace.
- VerifiedReports 11mo agoI haven't even considered Arduino for anything in years. It's just way overpriced and oversized. For the same price as an Uno you can get a Raspberry Pi 4, or seven Picos. Nonetheless, this looks like another step toward robbing everyone of something useful and reducing our options... not to mention encouraging others to do the same thing. Depressing.
- Animats 11mo agoHow safe is Raspberry Pi? Everybody seems to be using that now. Classic Arduino is too cramped. (I always wanted something in the middle. Some QNX-like OS in ROM, but will run without a file system. About 1-2MB of RAM.
- RachelF 11mo agoRaspberry Pi was never really that open hardware-wise. They've IPO'd and gone fully corporate/profit driven now. The ESP32 is probably the most vibrant platform now.
- ninalanyon 11mo agoNow that the Arduino style microcontroller and accessories ecosystem exists does it really matter if Arduino itself continues to exist?