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Fight Over Arduino Name Pits Originators Against Contract Manufacturer
szczys writes "Arduino is a household name in hobby electronics. But now there are two companies calling themselves Arduino and as you've probably guessed this is going to play out in the courts. How can this be? One company started the Arduino movement and used the other company, a contract manufacturer, to actually make the hardware. This went on for a few years before the trademark was actually granted. Elliot Williams did some digging to help figure out how this all might shake out."
Elliot Williams did dome digging
Dome digging is pretty crazy. One false move and you'll fall into the stadium.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It's pretty clear from anyone in the community that Arduino(TM) should belong to Arduino LLC. Massimo Banzi is the one person most associated with the name, arduino.cc is where everyone gets the IDE from and where the brand guidelines are, and a simple whois lookup shows it was created 26 October 2005.
But this is going to get very dirty and will drag out for a while.
Why would I pay $59 for an Arudino Yun when I can buy a nano clone + wifi for $7 total on eBay?
and it keeps going up as the patent office needs more money to sit around all day watching porn.
So we should all make an effort to not buy from the fake arduino company. I will be outfitting an entire maker space this year and will be sure it benefits arduino.cc. Shame on the other group.
Well for once this is an actual case of 'Intellectual Property Theft'. Usually the copyright industry and their employees in the FBI use this to refer to copyright infringement, but copying something doesn't deny a person the original thing, so its not THEFT.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/ipr
But here the contract manufacturer has registered the Trademark in an attempt to REMOVE it from its rightful owner, and that is THEFT of IP. It would remove the property from the real owner.
He can go after them for 'Deception and Confusion" as its called, because they've registered it in bad faith, they can be stripped of the right. Don't expect the FBI to kick down the door and try to arrest them for years in prison though. The law is distorted here and the FBI political choices don't support it.
If you look at the Buy Arduino Boards section of the Arduino site, all the boards are out of stock except for a couple of LilyPads. Also, the UNO Rev3 on that site lists for 20 euros. If you go to AliExpress you can find a clone for $6 with free shipping, including a USB cable, and if you want you can also get a clone for $3 (with free shipping) if you're willing to trade the FTDI USB-serial chip for a CH340G chip. From comments online the latter works fine, it just requires a different driver, and a lot of people are figuring we shouldn't be supporting FTDI either after what they did when they made their drivers bricks clones of their own chips. That's just one board. In my experience, the difference between prices of Arduino Mega boards and the clones are even worse.
I get that we want to support the official organization and I own 2 or 3 official boards. However, the price difference is sometimes too much to ignore. I spend a good deal of my time writing Arduino-compatible software and releasing it for free under an open source license on the internet. Lots of people have downloaded it and use it, and I am happy to answer their questions and help them with their projects for free. I don't expect to get paid a dime for that. A lot of people are doing similar stuff and we're all contributing to one big Arduino ecosystem in our own way. The fact that there are clones is a *good* thing. It's only the fact that clone-makers are using the Arduino trademark that's wrong. Also, if they say Arduino-compatible, then I think that's OK. Some of you might be too young to remember the birth of the PC, but IBM made the PC and then the clone-makers came along and made a whole bunch of cheaper and better *IBM-compatible* PCs. Look where that lead us.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
was trying to compile the firmware for my 3D printer. It turned out that the latest firmware (at the time) would not compile in latest version of the Arduino IDE. I had to hunt for a load an older version of the Arduino IDE to get it to work.
Open source is OK, but when you really have to get something done, a product that a bunch of people are paid to maintain and add to (Microsoft being the most notable exception) is usually going to work better. I always liked PIC microcontrollers and their IDE because it all just worked reliably and there was tons of support available. I have no idea how Arduino get so popular so fast when PIC stuff was already so cheap and easy to use.
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