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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'
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.
There are dozens of Cortex-M boards far more capable than Arduino and much cheaper. STM's, for one.
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.
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
I think that it was more than just marketing. Prior to Arduino, it as hard to get started in working with microcontrollers. Almost every manufacturer focused their products on already trained engineers. Arduino, from the beginning was primarily targeted toward learning for beginners.
1. Arduino was cheap
2. Arduino did not require specialty hardware for programming
3. The IDE was free, cross platform, and worked out of the box without any complicated set up.
4. They focused on lots of accessible documentation and learning material.
Now that Arduino has been successful, everybody else has jumped on the bandwagon and in many ways have developed superior ecosystems. But I credit Arduino for being the trailblazer. I have recently reallly been into MBED and Spark Core, but I doubt that those systems would exist as they are today had it not been for the creators of Arduino.
Basically my perspective on this- Arduino LLC is delivering real value by developing the open-source IDE along with an API and the capability to provide 3rd party hardware support easily in their IDE. (Recent example: http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-ide-support-for-the-esp8266/ )
Folks might not like the IDE, but the API provides a nice platform for obtaining working code for interfacing with lots of hardware. Arduino LLC's work is partly defining and expanding that API & framework.
Arduino SRL makes crappy hardware. Their market is now quite commoditized. I will be donating to Arduino LLC soon to make my point.
the real at&t mix
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.
Why so mad?
I've seen this many times--where people insist that Arduino-related anything is somehow "not real electronics/programming". As if it were only a lot harder to use, it would somehow "build programmers with better morals and ideology, like me."
???
It's not the best hardware or software but it doesn't cost much to try.
And if people are doing it for fun, it doesn't need to be difficult or result in the adaptation of rigorous enterprise-level programming habits. If all they want is to blink the LEDs their way and it does that, how is that a bad thing?
There seems to be an odd perception that "the whole hobby of electronics would be better without all these Arduino people". If you feel this way, what is it they do that interferes with anything you wanted to do?
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
parent here.
not mad, i'm actually all for the making it easy for people to program anything
but as a contract firmware developer, there are a whole class of my customers that are so misled
by the 'arduino' name that they actively get in the way of me doing my job. instead of costing out
a board design i'm supposed to drive around the web looking for overpriced 'shield modules'
so i have to sell them on 'designing a shield' instead of 'making a board', which means paying way
too much for an amtel or cortex m daughterboard module
and as soon as i try to use the hardware to its potential by using C or assembly they get
pretty pissy and confused
anyways, good for arduino...i just wish they had kept the hardware/software distinction so I could have
a meaningful conversation with people, increase their reliability and decrease their costs like i'm
supposed to
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.
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
No the Arduino ecosystem relied in an initial push to get the ball rolling. The Arduino IDE is stable and open source piece of software. The Arduino hardware is commodity AVR microcontrollers and two sets of headers with funny spacing and a common pinout. If both Arduino SRL and Arduino LLC vapourised tomorrow it won't make a difference as the critical mass has already been reached. Providing the IDE remains available, providing the Arduino compatible boards, often knock-offs of the original ones, remain available (which they will), then people will keep designing for Arduino shields, and the platform will go on.
So to go back to your statement: How does your time and money change as a result of what is happening by these two companies now? They aren't the sole source of the hardware, the software is open source, and the ecosystem is heavily propped up by after-market and other commercial products, and community forums. Why would the amount of "trouble" suddenly change to your value proposition?
. 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.
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
Do what now? I can buy Arduino boards from any number of manufacturers, and I can get Arduino software from the open-source community and/or write some myself. Nothing here changes that - it certainly does not and cannot render the platform unviable.
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
What you say is true, however I feel it sidesteps the point that Arduino SRL's actions are damaging to the brand. They're flushing their own investment by attempting to take control of something that, as you've pointed out, is far beyond their reigns. If I were a distributor of Arduino SRL's products, and had read up on the story, what would I think of continuing to distribute their products?
Yes, you can buy Arduino boards from any number of manufacturers and the software is open source. What this changes is whether Arduino SRL is going to be a worthwhile source of any of that.
And if it's not? Plenty of others can take up the slack. They're only hurting themselves, not the Arduino community.
Oh I agree. They should die in a fire, but my point is that the ecosystem is out of their control. If they disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't change that Arduino is used and works on thousands of clones, copies, and even in some legit products which have been loaded with their bootloader.
I'm speaking back against the assertion that Arduino SRL's actions in some way make the Arduino ecosystem not worth the trouble. They could run around tomorrow and start killing babies, but the system itself will still work the same way it did yesterday.