by adhoc_slime
1 subcomments
- arduino's response to the discourse is here:
https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
- This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:
> 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
by whynotmaybe
0 subcomment
- > The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied.
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
Yep, the complete opposite of "open".
by abstractbeliefs
1 subcomments
- Arduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time.
This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
- Do tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.
- Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143
- What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
by sansseriff
9 subcomments
- I remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.
Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?
Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?
- From Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
- Arduino official response - https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
- Sad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago.
I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.
by shevy-java
0 subcomment
- That's sad. Perhaps a fork may be created, but right now I think it is true that arduino is dead. Guess we need an alternative now.
by actinium226
7 subcomments
- It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
by VerifiedReports
0 subcomment
- I haven't even considered Arduino for anything in years. It's just way overpriced and oversized. For the same price as an Uno you can get a Raspberry Pi 4, or seven Picos.
Nonetheless, this looks like another step toward robbing everyone of something useful and reducing our options... not to mention encouraging others to do the same thing. Depressing.
- How safe is Raspberry Pi? Everybody seems to be using that now. Classic Arduino is too cramped.
(I always wanted something in the middle. Some QNX-like OS in ROM, but will run without a file system. About 1-2MB of RAM.
- Please, before commenting on this article, be sure to read Qualcomm's reply posted by adhoc_slime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007805
by LandoCalrissian
0 subcomment
- Qualcomm blew this up in record time, impressive stuff.
- I see Gianluca Martino let arduino.com lapse/is squatting it. Maybe the experiment is done? Is Adafruit no longer #TeamArduinoCC ?
- Well, I'd say the Qualcommisation of Arduino is happening as expected and apace.
by ninalanyon
0 subcomment
- Now that the Arduino style microcontroller and accessories ecosystem exists does it really matter if Arduino itself continues to exist?
by jcalvinowens
0 subcomment
- Is Arduino actually used for anything serious? While I certainly appreciate how their whole ecosystem has made working with microcontrollers more accessible... even the most casual hobbyists I know very quickly move on to something like an ESP32.
- https://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Who does the fork? Paging e.g. Adafruit and Sparkfun.
- Qualcomm wasted no time and tanking this purchase. Not sure how the MBA's thought this would be a good idea to change everything about a project. Wouldn't be surprised to see the prices of the boards go up $200 tomorrow at this rate.
- This was already covered in the previous thread you mentioned. Just merge the threads.
- Arduino merda.
- Qualcomm would force arduino to focus at enterprise offering
its happy ending for both investor
- Looks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.
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