alt Hacker NewsIDK, what kind of innovation we need from Arduino now? Arduino IDE exists and is open source. Arduino Uno exists and is open source. Arduino cores, both from Arduino itself and third-party exist and are open source. Not sure how they made money recently, I hope they are up to something good with Qualcomm.
> Not sure how they made money recently,
That's an easy riddle to answer: Nothing sold by Arduino is particularly inexpensive. They've got room for profit margin. It's easier to make money when the things are several times more expensive than the competitors.
To pick an example: I can get a sketchy-feeling ESP32 board that was manufactured by some nameless entity and sold by a company that calls themselves "QQQMFXFDCX" or something. It'll probably generally work, but the pins will be in whatever order, labeled however, and I might have to spend some time documenting its unknown [mis]features. It will cost me a few dollars.
Or, I mean: I can get one from Arduino with their name on it (and with a ublox-branded module) in their Nano form-factor for ~$20. It will work fine. The pins will be [mostly] in numeric order, and labeled on both sides of the board. It will cost me about $20.
There's a lot more potential profit margin in a $20 sale than there is in a $3 sale.
(Do they add enough value to make me want to spend $20 instead of $3? Not necessarily, but I'm pretty cheap.)