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When Arduino got popular, the original team of five spun off a manufacturing company, Smart Projects, to handle the manufacturing and distribution tedium, with

When Arduino got popular, the original team of five spun off a manufacturing company, Smart Projects, to handle the manufacturing and distribution tedium, with 4 of the 5 partners staying in the Development arm. When push came to shove and the development side wanted to make the manufacturing non-exclusive, Smart Projects beat them to the legal punch and registered the trademark before the development team did, forked and uprevved what they could, and cut off the income from sales going back to the dev team.

frik 12y ago
The German Heise News had an article: Arduino against Arduino: Founder argue about the company English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fmake%2Fmeldung%2FArduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... German: http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruen...
- Alupis 12y ago
  Seems to be a lot of "piggy-backers" piling onto the Github page without understanding the history... > By the way, you (meaning the people who started this phony organization and made this phony fork) know that you've made the front page of Hacker News, right? If you continue, there will be no shortage of people who will constantly point out that you're a bunch of wannabe fakers. It's sad that HN is perpetuating this behavior.
  - pygy_ 12y ago
    They're right. See [0] for the details. Excerpt: When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders (myself [Massimo Banzi] , David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino) decided to create a company that would own the trademarks and manage the business side of Arduino: Manufacturers would build and sell boards, Arduino would get a royalty from them like in many other businesses, such as in the fashion world. This happened in April 2008 when Arduino LLC was founded and the bylaws of the company specified that each of the five founders would transfer to this company any ownership of the Arduino brand. At the end of 2008 when Arduino was about to register the trademark in the US and worldwide, unknown to us and without any advance notice, Gianluca’s company Smart Projects — our main boards manufacturer — went ahead and registered the Arduino name in Italy and kept this news for himself for almost two years. After the process of registering in the US was over and our lawyer tried to extend the trademark to the rest of the world, he realised that somebody had registered it already in Italy. We (Tom, David, David, and I) were shocked and demanded explanations. Gianluca reassured us that this was done to protect our collective investment. We were friends (or so we thought), so based on this agreement we kept working together for years, received royalties while quietly trying to bring the trademark back into the Arduino company through endless discussions that dragged on while Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn’t even get a salary out of it). As the project became more successful and sales increased, the attempts at regaining control of the Italian trademark registration became more and more difficult with larger and larger demands made to us while Gianluca effectively vetoed us from either bringing in other manufacturers or get any external investment. We made headway with Arduino creating a lot of innovation, pushing the boundaries of open source hardware, hiring a lot of talented people around the world and ultimately building an amazing community around the arduino.cc website. ——— 0. http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
    - Alupis 12y ago
      I wouldn't exactly call a founder-spin-off a "bunch of wannabe fakers" and a "phony organization" and a "phony fork". There was a disagreement, and one founder went his own way. The story is clearly messy and very unfortunate for the Arduino founders, but there's nothing "phony" or "fake" here.
      - pygy_ 12y ago
        "Phony" is charitable. Smart Projects LLC has been acting in bad faith for at least seven years (registering the trademark in Italy after having pledged to transfer the IP to Arduino LLC).
      - deeviant 12y ago
        I wouldn't exactly call a duplicitous and wilful act of attempting to subvert a trade name and associated business from those who approached and enriched said subverting party in good faith a "founder-spin-off."
  - kordless 12y ago
    People would rather blame someone else for something they rationalize the someone else has done than blame themselves for the things they just did. We're broken in that regard, and it's time to fix it.

frik 12y ago

The German Heise News had an article: Arduino against Arduino: Founder argue about the company English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fmake%2Fmeldung%2FArduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr... German: http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruen...

Alupis 12y ago
Seems to be a lot of "piggy-backers" piling onto the Github page without understanding the history... > By the way, you (meaning the people who started this phony organization and made this phony fork) know that you've made the front page of Hacker News, right? If you continue, there will be no shortage of people who will constantly point out that you're a bunch of wannabe fakers. It's sad that HN is perpetuating this behavior.
- pygy_ 12y ago
  They're right. See [0] for the details. Excerpt: When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders (myself [Massimo Banzi] , David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino) decided to create a company that would own the trademarks and manage the business side of Arduino: Manufacturers would build and sell boards, Arduino would get a royalty from them like in many other businesses, such as in the fashion world. This happened in April 2008 when Arduino LLC was founded and the bylaws of the company specified that each of the five founders would transfer to this company any ownership of the Arduino brand. At the end of 2008 when Arduino was about to register the trademark in the US and worldwide, unknown to us and without any advance notice, Gianluca’s company Smart Projects — our main boards manufacturer — went ahead and registered the Arduino name in Italy and kept this news for himself for almost two years. After the process of registering in the US was over and our lawyer tried to extend the trademark to the rest of the world, he realised that somebody had registered it already in Italy. We (Tom, David, David, and I) were shocked and demanded explanations. Gianluca reassured us that this was done to protect our collective investment. We were friends (or so we thought), so based on this agreement we kept working together for years, received royalties while quietly trying to bring the trademark back into the Arduino company through endless discussions that dragged on while Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn’t even get a salary out of it). As the project became more successful and sales increased, the attempts at regaining control of the Italian trademark registration became more and more difficult with larger and larger demands made to us while Gianluca effectively vetoed us from either bringing in other manufacturers or get any external investment. We made headway with Arduino creating a lot of innovation, pushing the boundaries of open source hardware, hiring a lot of talented people around the world and ultimately building an amazing community around the arduino.cc website. ——— 0. http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/ http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
  - Alupis 12y ago
    I wouldn't exactly call a founder-spin-off a "bunch of wannabe fakers" and a "phony organization" and a "phony fork". There was a disagreement, and one founder went his own way. The story is clearly messy and very unfortunate for the Arduino founders, but there's nothing "phony" or "fake" here.
    - pygy_ 12y ago
      "Phony" is charitable. Smart Projects LLC has been acting in bad faith for at least seven years (registering the trademark in Italy after having pledged to transfer the IP to Arduino LLC).
    - deeviant 12y ago
      I wouldn't exactly call a duplicitous and wilful act of attempting to subvert a trade name and associated business from those who approached and enriched said subverting party in good faith a "founder-spin-off."
- kordless 12y ago
  People would rather blame someone else for something they rationalize the someone else has done than blame themselves for the things they just did. We're broken in that regard, and it's time to fix it.