alt Hacker NewsSeems like a similar play to what Broadcom did with Raspberry Pi— create a new entity/brand that could resell their chips on hobby boards and be stewards of a "community" support framework but largely without distracting the company from its enterprise customers or risk cannibalizing those relationships.
That said, interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space.
Replies
Broadcom wasn't really a driver behind Raspberry Pi. They acquiesced and let them have chips, once the product took off, they continued supplying chips for the Pi. And of course supported the community by refusing to supply non-propriety firmware blobs to this day ;)
Other than that, Broadcom never really had any community involvement, nor any involvement in the Raspberry Pi Foundation that runs it. However, some broadcom engineers were part of the foundation, which isn't quite the same.
> interesting that Qualcomm would buy twenty years of Arduino legacy for this rather than launching something new in the space
I wouldn't minimise the effect of people just googling around and finding the name Arduino all over the place. It would be very hard for an entirely new platform to get critical mass while esp32 is not standing still.