alt Hacker NewsAdafruit: Arduino’s Rules Are ‘Incompatible With Open Source’
Comments
Ever since I got involved with Espressif's ESP32/ESP8266 chips, I haven't even thought about arduinos, except to download the UI, but you don't even need to do that with the right VSCode extensions to make your life better.
I do keep meaning to try this though - https://platformio.org/
The raspberry pico is much nicer to work with, if you're looking for an alternative. It has dual core if you need it, and the fun little IO coprocessors if you want to get really low level. The pico2 even has a risc-v mode
The process of getting a binary onto the board is just dragging a file, and on linux at least you can script it with picotool
Seems fine. There's a Qualcomm SaaS platform you don't need that they have the boilerplate no-hacking clause on. And Arduinos are the same as always. Considering the EFF and Arduino positions in favour, both of whom have done a lot for open-source stuff, I really can't be bothered that Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content.
This article doesn’t really explain how the new Arduino stuff works, which makes it harder to judge the impact of these new licenses. I’m used to flashing microcontroller boards over USB, originally from the Arduino IDE, more recently with PlatformIO. I’ve bought boards that have WiFi, but it wasn’t an essential part of the development environment.
I did a bit of searching and found some sketchy documentation that just leaves me with more questions. It sounds like Arduino’s new web editor programs boards wirelessly somehow? Does it assume the board has WiFi? What is this new, networked system? What Internet protocols does it use? How do you pair it with the web editor?
I doubt Qualcomm will be able to pressure there rules to the market. They do not own the cpu and making a arduino like board is very easy nowerdays. The have not even the power over the bootloader or the compiler. Library’s are either standard c/c++ or open source. People also do not like the arduino ide because the days of easy setup and run are gone and a real way of debug is needed in most projects. China board makers will never obey any rules and marketplaces like alibaba will still sell clones. Perhaps the ai at Qualcomm told them to buy arduino because it is in a suicide mission. Please excuse my bad English, no native speaker
"Anything that was open, stays open".
Now contemplate open Android and Google Play Services.
It's a bit odd that most of this article is various claims from one of Arduino's competitors being taken at face value, especially when the EFF spokesperson generally seems to think the new terms broadly make sense, albeit with some criticisms.
It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.
Adafruit is pretty clearly the front-runner these days in the educational/hobbyist market, Arduino (and even SparkFun) have fallen by the wayside. My only gripe is the focus on micropython these days, it can introduce a barrier later in the learning process when you eventually need to leave the nicely organized sandbox. They still support the “Arduino” C++ libraries, but uPy is the default.
> Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit
They are PCB brands. The microcontrollers are made by the usual manufacturers like ST, Renesas, Infineon...
I never use Arduino or Arduino IDE anyway; it's incredibly laggy for me, and I hate having these things in the cloud. I mainly use Pico and VS Code now.
I feel like Arduino has lost its unique place in all but mindshare 5+ years ago. What I would recommend as a default:
- Wi-Fi: Esp Risc-V (C3 etc)
- BLE without Wi-Fi (Or ANTD): Nordic. Also a good choice in general for simple devices
- General-purpose, including high-performance, low-power, and high I/O: Stm32
If using rust, probe-rs + cargo is a "just works" CLI workflow to compile, flash, and debug.
As an aside, I have never seen a decent license for user generated content. Either they expose the platform to serious liability, or they come across as incredibly predatory.
Hobbyists don’t get full exposure to this, but the reality is that the embedded space is still very much a binary blob landscape. Even relatively popular SDKs like Expressif and Nordic’s are full of weird proprietary stuff, and it just gets worse as you go into beefier hardware (Rockchip, I’m looking at you).
But yeah, Arduino is in a weird place right now. I knew people there (kind of lost track), quite liked their IDE and how accessible it made a lot of things, but the recent turn on events is just… weird.
That has been a long way coming. Only a couple of months ago I was looking at alternatives and "Arduino compatible" products. The reason being simply that so many "for fun projects" are built with it and I wondered what good alternatives there are.
I kind of drifted off. So curious about what people here think is the best "Arduino when it still was open source" contender. Preferably something Arduino compatible because of the sheer amount of projects already out there.
That said I've heard a fair bit about Adafruit criticism as well, but that's more on the company level and no personal experience there.
I'd like to see HN generally take a stance that a hacking-ish education platform like Arduino should be open source and hacking-friendly.
(Disclosure: I know the Adafruit founder, but haven't discussed this matter with her.)
We knew it would go this way when they were acquired
Isn’t arduino completely open source including its PCB, firmware, IDE, etc, even accessible for commercial use?
This seems dumb from Qualcomms point of view...
T&C's preventing reverse engineering of an online platform seems to have no real business value. Serious hackers will ignore the T&C's, whilst serious competitors will not need to do any reverse engineering to build an online compiler.
These days I don't think Arduinos are meaningfully more accessible than, say, an ESP8266 or ESP32. If I was starting a new hobby project today I'd choose the latter.
They should team up with Sparkfin and establish a new open platform.
I have gotten into platformio cli and find it much easier to program an MCU this way
Qualcomm is a patent troll, no money for those guys.
We need an arduino fork.
It's sad that they are killing Arduino.
I would likely check the open source definition, chances are the changes are actually compatible with open source.
Maybe it should all have been free software all the time.
Arduino was always a terrible pseudo-language/IDE, taught bad workmanship, and had problems with fast chip io handling etc.
However, it was a "standard" boot-loader, had consistent documentation, and a wide community of users. It encouraged people of all skill levels to play with chips, and that was great.
These days a full Linux SoC is often cheaper than most mcu. The age of the Arduino board will just end a little quicker now. Generally, irritating a planet of bored computer engineers does not end well for a business. =3
Arduino was the first (and then, the only) simple microcontroller, that you could give to someone, even a child, give them a 5 page tutorial, and they'd be able to blink leds, capture a button press, a potentiometer input and display the results via leds or 7 segment displays. Every other microcontroller needed a special board to program it, you needed a thick book to program it, take care of registers, use some weird windows-only ide and usually none of that was free... arduino was just different, one board, one cable, free software and good documentation.
Of course, an ecosystem has grown around that, so you could attach pretty much any popular device (sensor, display, input device,...) to it, and the library was already made for you to simply use it in your project.
But now, years later? There are many such controllers, from esp8266/esp32 to rpi pico, with additional features (wifi included) on better boards (displays, buttons, interfaces,...), for even less money.
Yes, the original arduino was important.. but if it vanishes overnight, very few people would notice.
>Adafruit’s Torrone had also said Arduino’s new documents “introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload.”
Yea that's gonna be a hard pass for me. Thank goodness for the Pi Pico which means I'll never have to use Arduino ever again. On a side note, the new Arduino IDE based on Monaco looked nice but made development so painful I just stopped. I had to keep disconnecting and reconnecting devices all the time to upload sketches when before with the old IDE that was never an issue. Everything Arduino feels like a regression.
IMO too many people come to the conclusion that Qualcomm will in some way screw up the Arduino takeover at the expense of the community.
And I think these people are right, but that is not necessary a bad thing.
There is just about no reason a giant like Qualcomm would take over something like Arduino for any other purpose but to acquire resources (talent, customers, community, processes, documentation, ...) they can use to teach themselves how to become more open, to what degree they even want to and to have a trusted platform they can take their initial steps in and will get feedback from.
And the reality is, that someone with little experience will screw up badly, several times. I mean, look at the current state of the major silicon IP holders, the only reason they dont ship brain-chips with their NDAs that explode the moment you mention the wrong part number infornt of a competitor is because the NDAs for the documentation on how to install the brain-chips would get them stuck in recursion hell.
And just as little experience Qualcomm has at making open source a successful business strategy, Arduino has just as little experience at being a corporate Godzilla trying to carefully pet the egg they just adopted. And let's be real: Open source projects OWE it to their community to be financially successful, because it's that financial success that guarantees that the project CAN STAY open and wont force its core maintainers into choosing between their commitment to their community and a fulfilling lifestyle, although for someone like Qualcomm this success can probably be something else but financial in nature (acquiring talent, their products becoming a preferred choice, schools teaching students using Qualcomm products, whatever).
Both Arduino and Qualcomm will end up outside of their domain and it'd be surprising if this would not result in major mistakes being made.
.
Qualcomm has to evaluate whether their new talent at Arduino is doing a good job and are suddenly looking at a giant dumpster fire, wondering what could have possibly caused this since their lawyers aren't even half-done sticking on the "by Qualcomm" labels yet.
Right now, instead of trying to pressure Qualcomm into making commitments they do not understand, the community should try to adopt the role of a stakeholder, who prioritizes a long and healthy relationship with a currently struggling contractor over getting the desired product at a reasonable timeline.
The community needs to make a cold day in hell happen, calm down, get together and formalize what they think they liked about Arduino up until now, the fundamental requirements that need to be retained or even developed and what would be nice to have.
Is this another one of those opensource project gone wrong, that when they lose the user base because of this gray(blackish) i would say) “new terms” they apologise and try to come back… often too late?
After Qualcomm bought them? Who could have seen this coming? Hang on while I get back to arguing with my MSP that I really would prefer ProxMox over HyperV to replace VMWare.
There is a lot of shade being thrown against Adafruit in this discussion thread which is disappointing.
It is disappointing because it distracts from the discussion around Open Source and Arduino as a long term educational tool. Regardless if that shade is in good faith or not, it distracts from the conversation we should be having.
> our commitment to the open source spirit is unwavering and Arduino’s core mission remains unchanged
Running a proprietary SaaS doesn't really show commitment to open source.
I'm a long time user of the Arduino IDE for third party boards such as the Teensy. Recently I've switched to Platformio for coding. So I should be satisfied with never needing Arduino's cloud service.
But Adafruit points out a problem, which is that the cloud service is the only available option for students using school-issued Chromebooks. I can confirm that a school-issued Chromebook is likely to be set up to lock out access to any programming tools. We wouldn't want children to learn coding after all, right?
I think relying on a corporation to preserve our freedom to code is a bit too optimistic.