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."

Comments

Dome Diggers!

[TechyImmigrant]

Elliot Williams did dome digging

Dome digging is pretty crazy. One false move and you'll fall into the stadium.

Re:Dome Diggers!

[freeze128]

Maybe the editors should do dome editing.

Re:Dome Diggers!

[ArcadeMan]

Cut them dome slack, it's not like they're paid to do this job.

Legalities aside

[Dracos]

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.

Re:Legalities aside

[ShanghaiBill]

It's pretty clear from anyone in the community that Arduino(TM) should belong to Arduino LLC.

It should also be clear to anyone with half a brain that the first thing you do when starting a project, is nail down the IP. Registering a trademark is trivial (I own about a dozen). If you don't, you are building on a foundation of sand.

Re:Legalities aside

[Anonymous Coward]

not every project has money and not every project knows its going to catch on at first

buying a trademark for every idea gets expensive for some of us.

apparently you've only ever had a dozen ideas

Re:Legalities aside

[ShanghaiBill]

Yea- I don't know, but I don't have $5k in lawyer fees and trademark registration fees to throw around.

You don't need a lawyer to register a trademark. You just fill out a form. It doesn't cost anywhere near $5k.

Re:Legalities aside

[ArcadeMan]

It's less than 5000$ to register a trademark in all countries?

Re:Legalities aside

[kenai_alpenglow]

According to one lawyer I was doing business with, all you have to do is put the "tm" whenever you use it. It's not perfect, but shows that you intend for it to be a trademark. Cost: $0.00

Re:Legalities aside

[gl4ss]

well, you might not want to focus on it right away when you're trying to keep an open, community, cloners welcome face at the beginning. being zealous about trademarks, patents and stuff at such a phase is generally bad.

thing is, once they realized it was a success and could pay for the bills, they've started being real bitches. which wouldn't be so bad if they produced nice boards with their license money, but their next gen boards just aren't very good. due is sucky.

so there's dozens of boards now on the market that can't market themselves as arduinos yet everyone speaks of them as arduinos due to having arduino compatible bootloader. so then what they are gets buried in the products description.

the rebranding of an existing 3d printer as an arduino printer topping it all off to a state where I don't even bother to go to official arduino(tm)(r)(c) site to even check if they got their heads out of their asses or not.

besides, if you wanted to buy from arduino.cc... only the lilypads are in stock of the boards.

really.

Re:Legalities aside

[Midnight Thunder]

It only costs $275.

Is this also the same cost in Italy? Remember that Arduino originated in Italy.

Additionally, what are the costs for an international trademark?

Re:Arduino hardware = Dead on arrival

[anagama]

I've been studiously buying official boards because that means money went back to Arduino in some way (http://arduino.cc/en/Main/FAQ , scroll down a little to the official board part).

However, if they're just going to be burning their time and money on litigation -- well, I'm not so keen on supporting that and I think I'll just start buying clones.

Re:Arduino hardware = Dead on arrival

[gweihir]

Shield compatibility is limited with clones in general. For small numbers, that can save more money than the increase in cost. (Also the Yun is not the minimalistic clone you get on Ebay.) For larger numbers, getting the blank components is a lot cheaper.

That said, personally, I usually prefer clones that add to the features. As long as you have some clue, using the original hardware is not that much of an advantage.

Re:Arduino hardware = Dead on arrival

[BitZtream]

So you're comparing a Arduino that has an AVR chip, an ARM chip, onboard ethernet and onboard wifi ... with a board thats little more than a break out for an AVR chip and nothing else?

Perhaps if you knew anything about what you were buying, you might have a clue as to why the prices are so different. A Nano and a Yun are radically different devices.

You've essentially just compared an Yugo to a freight train, to use a car analogy.

Arduino has not boards in stock anyway

[RobinH]

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.

Re:Arduino has not boards in stock anyway

[ArcadeMan]

Or you can just forget the bootloader and program your boards via the 6-pins ISP header and bypass the FTDI vs CH340 issues.

My limited experience with Arduino

[mark_reh]

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.

They just couldnt resist.

[danknight48]

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