An abridged timeline:

1960s to 1980s: hobbyist and academic/research computing create thriving public domain software ecosystems (literally the birth of FOSS)

1983: The GNU Project begins

1989: The World Wide Web is created

1991: Linus Torvalds posts the first Linux kernel to USENET

1992: 386BSD is released; Slackware is created

1993: NetBSD is forked; Debian is created

1994: FreeBSD 2 is released

1995: Red Hat is created

[a decade of FOSS and the internet changing computing and research forever]

2005: A collection of low-cost microcontroller education tools, benefiting from half a century of FOSS, is formalized into something called "Arduino"

-- statement from Qualcomm without a single human being's name on it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978802

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45985663

> We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates.

Translation: Y’all are angry about us changing what we stood for.

> We are thankful our community cares enough to engage with us and we believe transparency and open dialogue are foundational to Arduino.

Translation: You fuckers are loud and this is blowing up in our faces, so we need to do damage control fast or the acquisition will be worthless.

That is a weird, weird claim for a firm that was founded off the back of a project that started in 2005.

It’s, what, over five years after the VA Linux IPO, two years after Microsoft arguably used Caldera as a weapon in a proxy war against IBM, seven years after one of the most famous software products of all time, Netscape Navigator, went open source.

Just a strange, facially implausible bit of appeal to tradition.

This is a VERY bad attempt at self-promo, sorry.

Many other open source projects are much older, so "fashionable" is a very emotionally laden word. But, even aside from this: what matters is the now and future. You can not refer to a "glorious past" if the future just looks bleak and bad.

"The Qualcomm acquisition doesn’t modify how user data is handled or how we apply our open-source principles."

Everyone already sees that the Qualcomm take-over changed the project. There is no way to deny it. Now, perhaps it COULD lead to an improvement - who knows. But it can also lead to a stagnation or decline. We saw that with many other projects that suddenly became progressively starved down. Even without a corporate overlord that may happen, when users, hobbyists, devs, are no longer as interested. They may write fewer blog entries and so forth - decline happens.

"We periodically update our legal documents to reflect new features, evolving regulations, and best practices."

As does Mozilla - yet firefox keeps on dying and dwindling.

Sorry, but this just reads like a post mortem to me.

"Restrictions on reverse-engineering apply specifically to our Software-as-a-Service cloud applications"

Which open source licence typically were to include that? And, by the way - I am increasingly noticing how the "legal terms" try to provide provisions that aren't part of a licence. I noticed this some time ago with regard to RubyCentral slapping down meta-corporate rules on rubygems.org (see here https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/07/08/policies-live.html). So this is what corporations want to do. I don't see how this benefits the hobbyists or solo devs in any way, shape or form. And I don't agree that this "sets the record straight" either.

To me it reads like a corporate take-over of arduino. That's bad.

Or is this Arduino trying to save face?

That’s a lie. Perhaps they lie to themselves. I don’t know. I can only guess.

"Military weird things"

Reading the ToS, the two mentions of military are "don't use our AI product for military use" and in the export and trade controls section.

How are either of those weird?