31–40 of 97 posts
Adafruit acted a bit shady here. Their original post includes: "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?
If the only restriction on reverse engineering is their cloud SaaS, why was everyone up in arms? Or is this Arduino trying to save face?
Large companies have repeatedly demonstrated that they will pick whichever interpretation is most convenient at the time. When there are pitchforks they will claim that you are confused and misinterpreted the writing but when you get poisoned by food in their restaurant and try to sue them they will point at terms of service on their online video streaming service that your spouse agreed 5 years ago as if that's rele…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their definition of "the platform" in the TOS is verbose and has weird grammar. I can see how people came away with a different understanding. > User shall not translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements; > The Site is part of the…
I can only read this as the entirety of "Arduino open source ecosystem" being part of "the Platform".
Seems reasonable. I have a Duemilanove and an Uno R2 that I haven't used in ages but Arduino stuff has always been open as far as I remember. I really can't bring myself to pull out the pitchforks here. They've earned the trust from me. It's been over a decade now.
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"
Adafruit acted a bit shady here. Their original post includes: "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?
> Military Use: Use by or for any military organization or for any military purpose, including but not limited to projects sponsored or paid for by military organizations, or use by the U.S. Department of Defense (except for DARPA), U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. intelligence agencies, or any foreign counterparts of the foregoing.
Adafruit acted a bit shady here. Their original post includes: "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?
>Adafruit acted a bit shady here what is new here?
> 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.
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.
"we have been open-source long before it was fashionable" 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…
I think ideas etc... existed before that, e. g. DARPA and what Alan Kay said.
Tim mostly pushed forward a simple protocol that worked. Would be interesting to see how much Tim really generated de-novo, but in general I disagree that he "invented" the world wide web as such. That would seem unfair to many other people - just like Alan Kay once said, you see further by standing on the shoulders of giants (translation: you benefitted from earlier inventions and ideas, made by other people).