"We are Arduino. We are open. We’re not going anywhere."
-- statement from Qualcomm without a single human being's name on it
Sorry, you got bought by Qualcomm and that was suicide.
What I don't get is how what they do is even legally possible, since the libraries have all F/OSS licenses (MIT, LGPL, GPL, APL), and they don't even own the sole copyright to most things.
“ we have been open-source long before it was fashionable.”
That is a weird, weird claim for a firm that was founded off the back of a project that started in 2005.
It’s, what, over five years after the VA Linux IPO, two years after Microsoft arguably used Caldera as a weapon in a proxy war against IBM, seven years after one of the most famous software products of all time, Netscape Navigator, went open source.
Just a strange, facially implausible bit of appeal to tradition.
I don't get it, do we keep the pitchforks out, or do we stash the pitchforks?
Anyone have any advice for Arduino replacement? I recently (unknowingly) bought a R4 for some LED projects but knowing now the background, I'm wondering if there's any other alternative for hobby (noob level) micro controller project
This is so full of vapid corporate speak, it’s ripe for one of those joke “translation” posts:
> We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates.
Translation: Y’all are angry about us changing what we stood for.
> We are thankful our community cares enough to engage with us and we believe transparency and open dialogue are foundational to Arduino.
Translation: You fuckers are loud and this is blowing up in our faces, so we need to do damage control fast or the acquisition will be worthless.
They say "privacy" a lot on that blog page, but that very page runs surveillance capitalism trackers from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others.
If the only restriction on reverse engineering is their cloud SaaS, why was everyone up in arms?
Or is this Arduino trying to save face?
Faceless corpo speak at best
This allays my suspicions. I appreciate the response to this community’s concerns.
"Let us be absolutely clear: we have been open-source long before it was fashionable"
This is a VERY bad attempt at self-promo, sorry.
Many other open source projects are much older, so "fashionable" is a very emotionally laden word. But, even aside from this: what matters is the now and future. You can not refer to a "glorious past" if the future just looks bleak and bad.
"The Qualcomm acquisition doesn’t modify how user data is handled or how we apply our open-source principles."
Everyone already sees that the Qualcomm take-over changed the project. There is no way to deny it. Now, perhaps it COULD lead to an improvement - who knows. But it can also lead to a stagnation or decline. We saw that with many other projects that suddenly became progressively starved down. Even without a corporate overlord that may happen, when users, hobbyists, devs, are no longer as interested. They may write fewer blog entries and so forth - decline happens.
"We periodically update our legal documents to reflect new features, evolving regulations, and best practices."
As does Mozilla - yet firefox keeps on dying and dwindling.
Sorry, but this just reads like a post mortem to me.
"Restrictions on reverse-engineering apply specifically to our Software-as-a-Service cloud applications"
Which open source licence typically were to include that? And, by the way - I am increasingly noticing how the "legal terms" try to provide provisions that aren't part of a licence. I noticed this some time ago with regard to RubyCentral slapping down meta-corporate rules on rubygems.org (see here https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/07/08/policies-live.html). So this is what corporations want to do. I don't see how this benefits the hobbyists or solo devs in any way, shape or form. And I don't agree that this "sets the record straight" either.
To me it reads like a corporate take-over of arduino. That's bad.
No money for software patent bullies like Qualcomm.
The need of an Arduino fork.
> The Qualcomm acquisition doesn’t modify how user data is handled or how we apply our open-source principles.
That’s a lie. Perhaps they lie to themselves. I don’t know. I can only guess.
Adafruit acted a bit shady here. Their original post includes:
"Military weird things"
Reading the ToS, the two mentions of military are "don't use our AI product for military use" and in the export and trade controls section.
How are either of those weird?
Seems reasonable. I have a Duemilanove and an Uno R2 that I haven't used in ages but Arduino stuff has always been open as far as I remember. I really can't bring myself to pull out the pitchforks here. They've earned the trust from me. It's been over a decade now.
"we have been open-source long before it was fashionable"
An abridged timeline:
1960s to 1980s: hobbyist and academic/research computing create thriving public domain software ecosystems (literally the birth of FOSS)
1983: The GNU Project begins
1989: The World Wide Web is created
1991: Linus Torvalds posts the first Linux kernel to USENET
1992: 386BSD is released; Slackware is created
1993: NetBSD is forked; Debian is created
1994: FreeBSD 2 is released
1995: Red Hat is created
[a decade of FOSS and the internet changing computing and research forever]
2005: A collection of low-cost microcontroller education tools, benefiting from half a century of FOSS, is formalized into something called "Arduino"