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Arduino Dispute Reaches Out To Distributors
szczys writes Two companies are claiming ownership of the Arduino Trademark. The most recent development in this sad state of affairs is a letter from Arduino SRL to long-time Distributors of Arduino products. SRL is claiming they are the real Arduino, but there are some tasty tidbits including a Q/A section with some peculiar answers. From the article: "In short, Arduino LLC has been working on developing the Arduino platform, software, and community while Smart Projects / Arduino SRL was the major official producer of the hardware for most boards. Both are claiming to 'be' Arduino, and going after each other in court. So it’s not strange that Arduino SRL would like to try to keep its hold on the distribution channels."
Arduino turned 11 yesterday, and like many children of that age, the celebrations were kind of interrupted by its divorced parents' continuing battle for custody....
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Funny how the so called grown-ups act more childish than the children, boardrooms shouldn't behave like five year olds. Just demonstrates that these people are incompetent and grossly over-paid.
It turns out that Smart Projects had trademarked the Arduino brand in Italy in December 2008, before Arduino LLC got around to filing in April 2009 in the USA.
So... what's to discuss. I don't think there's a law against being a complete asshole, so smart projects wins.
Baaad dog! Baaad dog!
There are dozens of Cortex-M boards far more capable than Arduino and much cheaper. STM's, for one.
Great, one of the greatest open source ecosystem hijacked by greed, just at the time of the Arduino Zero which opens even more possibilities..
I won't buy anything more from those vultures at Smart Projects / Arduino SRL, there are other less scummy manufacturers of Arduino boards around.
It depends on the jurisdiction. Some areas assign rights to the first entity to use a trademark, some areas require registration, and some can be either/or. I think the USA is an either/or jurisdiction - if you give your company a name you own that name if you can show that you've been using it.
arduino was brilliant marketing. they took useful stuff that had been lying around forever, made it
easy to run hello world and created a whole new market.
hoever in doing do, they deliberately obscured the different between the board product and the
software product. i don't know how many frustrating discussions i've had with people wanting
to do 'arduino' work about what a micro controller is and what a board is and what a program is.
good for them, but avoiding reality leads to exactly this issue. is arduino a set of a board products
or a half-assed programming model for turning on and off gpios?
Sounds like a rehash of the (failed) SCO argument. We licensed UNIX, we're the only "official" seller of UNIX, therefore we ARE UNIX.
Didn't go so well for them.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Can't we all play nice? Arduino was such a happy product.
And just fuck already.
After Visicalc, the first electronic spreadsheet, gave businessmen a reason to buy personal computers (specifically Apple II's), a nasty round of litigation ensued between the company that developed the software (Software Arts) and the company that productized the software (Visicorp, nee Personal Software). Both companies were dragged down as Mitch Kapor and Lotus Development came out with the hit product on the new IBM PC.
The sage is now a staple of business school curricula on what not to do, I think.
http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiend.htm
There are dozens of XYZ boards far more capable than Rasberry Pi .
Man the whole point is that the arduino is a common platform for tinkers evrywhere. it's the libraries and community know how that make this fun. In some ways it's like the joy of stock car races where exceeding the imposed limits can be the fun of it. It's also really simple so it's something one person can truly master in their spare time. I'm addicted. I've had doofuses tell me about other development boards that are far superior for reans A,B, and C. Sure if I was building something just to be aproduct, But they aren't going to be any fun to goof with in general.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The Arduino ecosystem relied on the strong contributions from everyone involved to reach the heights that it has. This kind of action by one of the corporations involved is just a way of telling us all that Arduino is no longer worth the trouble. Hobbyists are losing one of the coolest products available because a board producer doesn't understand the value of the software that runs the board. Arduino is no longer worth the time and money in that scenario.
Sure, all the little shields and things are convenient. But most folks with a search engine and some jumper wires already find out how to connect things not designed for the Arduino to their boards.
But it's the software that has made it easy for everyone to get started immediately. I've used a dozen or so development environments for embedded, and Arduino's has the easiest learning curve I've seen. It's not particularly powerful or flexible, it's not super great at debug/ICE/ICD stuff. But you can type in the few line example C program, and flash your first blinking LED program in a matter of minutes.
For platform that is not commercial and not really for industrial purposes, the software seems to aim for the best user experience. And in software development, instant gratification is the biggest motivator there is.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
There are dozens of Cortex-M boards far more capable than Arduino and much cheaper. STM's, for one.
You mean like the Arduino Due? That's an Arduino combined with a cortex-M made by arduino.
I've not seen cortex-Ms for $2.50 but you can buy as many arduino's as you want for that. that's the whole board not just the chip. See alibaba.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
. But you can type in the few line example C program, and flash your first blinking LED program in a matter of minutes.
You could do that with all the other ones too. TI's Launchpad, Freescale's KINETIS board, STM have their discovery boards. They all let you blink some LEDs in a matter of minutes - and the Arduino ones are the most expensive. I rather suspect that most people don't do much more than blink some LEDs anyway, since doing anything much more complicated than that with the Arduino "IDE" is an extremely painful exercise indeed.
This is bad news for Arduino, and tinkerers - and just after Arduino day.
I don't agree. I've used Code Red, Launchpad, and others. And the tools they give you pretend to be professional tools, and seem to have a steep learning curve. Especially with Code Red wanting to upsell to a better version. But most of these free IDEs are more like trial versions to me. Adruino's crippling was done to make the process of making little gizmos more accessible, most other tools are crippling so they don't cut into other markets.
That said, I never really was much of a fan of Arduino because I don't have much use for AVR. This is me finally admitting that Adruino was pretty good, and that I may have been a little stubborn to have resisted it all these years.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I started playing with Arduinos a couple of years ago. You ordered them by mail order at the time. Eventually Radio Shack started carrying them, which made it easier for anybody to pick one up (and while I live in Silicon Valley, if I needed a few resistors or LEDs or simple components to go with them, it was often easier to stop at Radio Shack than Fry's or mailorder.) Now they're fighting over the name, and Radio Shack is going out of business.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
there is no more money in arduino hardware anymore.
arguing over who sells the hardware is a lose/lose game.
SLR has announced it's coming out with new boards. But will these be open designs or copyrighted? If they also take over the arduino name for software they control the whole pipeline. Cortex boards are about $20 to $40 right now and they outperform the arduino. SO why are the cortex boards, aside from the raspberry, an idle novelty? because they don't have the unified user base behind the arduino. So who better to come in and scoop this up? after all ardunio is already in this game with the DUE and YUN model which have high perfromance processors like the cortex yet all the existing I/O mapping and IDE of the ardiono. That's where the money lies. Not in the open source arduino hardware but in the next generation built on the user base of the arduino. But it takes the Arduino name to do it, and also someone willing to close the copyright on the desgins while retaining compatibility.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No, it's the entire environment that does that. The point of the Arduino is that any idiot can grab %insert Arduino model here% and attach %insert shield here%, go and download %insert library here% and then plug it all in and turn it on.
I have friends who have never programmed before using Arduinos for all sorts of neat things, controlling lights via PWM, monitoring environments etc. None of them would have achieved what they have if they had to dig through datasheets, understand the differences between voltages, signals, figure out how to communicate via I2S, or god forbid solder something (I'm sure most of them would have grabbed the iron like a pencil).
Arduino exists as it does because of all the little conveniences it provides.
That's fair. There is some real value in not having to write libraries and drivers from scratch for every project. I forgot that a shield isn't just a block of hardware that convenient interfaces, but usually someone has written some software for that shield that makes it pretty easy to integrate into a project.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Arduino was never the best name anyway. Come up with a new one, with an amusing competition of some sort, then form a less greedy body to take charge of the name, transfer all the open source rights etc to this new name, replace the rest, and teach these lousy business heads that the open source world is not a magic tree to be cherry picked. If a business does not act in the best interests of the rest of humanity, that business should be considered broken. Likewise between business and open-source and free-software. At times we must be brutal. My vote goes for Dinopod -- it's got a bit of the duino bit, albeit without the u, and a nice sounding syllable on the end. Then we just have to hope Apple doesn't think it owns the pod suffix like it thinks it owns the i prefix.
John_Chalisque
Arduino is nothing but an Atmega Microcontoller soldered onto a board with some pinouts and a MASSIVE price increase. I used to buy them $5 years before arduino and build my own projects all the time. I cannot believe the love Arduino is getting, it's not that hard to solder guys.
People that buy an arduino are like guys who buy a computer prebuilt to use for learning how to build computers without ever opening the case. Grow a pair and read an IC datasheet.