The Untold History of Arduino
arduinohistory.github.io
The Untold History of Arduino
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#2Wow, what a bag of douches.
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#3Wow thanks for sharing! Why you took so long to write! Glad you finally did!
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#4How-to become a douchbag in 10 steps:
1. Be the supervisor for a thesis that will become a open-sourced project
2. Use this open sourced project in one of the classes you teach at University
3. work together with and ask for help from the creator of the open-sourced project
4. see the value of the open-sourced project
5. fork it
6. claim it as yours
7. get rich by selling it
8. write super douchy email to a previous maintainer of the project you forked.
"Sorry JC but you had nothing to do.with this…. You can’t possibly try to get credit for.something you hadn’t been involved with"
9. Lie to media
".. In two days, Mellis banged out the code; three days more and the board was complete. .."
10. Tada - you are the biggest scumbag of all times.
Man, these guys deserve some shit. Why don't you send him a tweet? https://twitter.com/mbanzi/
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#5This clears up a lot of mysteries (and some of the drama) surrounding Arduino and Wiring that had puzzled me in the past. A bit late in the game to read this but good to know.
Also: not an entirely unusual case. There is always a race for credit for a true success, and it is not always due to real malice (not saying this is the case here.) People have a hard time remembering what came before they were involved, and lack the incentive to find out.
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#6incredible read. I checked out the author's current work, and it's beautiful: http://barraganstudio.com/
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#7How-to become a douchbag in 10 steps: 1. Be the supervisor for a thesis that will become a open-sourced project 2. Use this open sourced project in one of the classes you teach at University 3. work together with and ask for help from the creator of the open-sourced project 4. see the value of the open-sourced project 5. fork it 6. claim it as yours 7. get rich by selling it 8. write super douchy email to a previous…
This is part of the reason I just buy the cheapest Arduino-compatible clones possible and laugh at the idea that we should all buy genuine Arduino to support the people who put in the hard work - it's been fairly obvious for a long time that it was a Wiring rip-off through and through. Probably also why the official Arduino ports to non-AVR architectures are so incompetent compared to third-party ones; the AVR port was taken from Wiring and just modified slightly, so no-one there had the skills to write one from scratch.
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#8The real work involved thousands of hours of research, prototyping, testing, and backtracking.
The most infuriating part of the story is the usurpers painting themselves as geniuses with the claim that they "banged it out" in a few days.
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#9This clears up a lot of mysteries (and some of the drama) surrounding Arduino and Wiring that had puzzled me in the past. A bit late in the game to read this but good to know. Also: not an entirely unusual case. There is always a race for credit for a true success, and it is not always due to real malice (not saying this is the case here.) People have a hard time remembering what came before they were involved, and l…
You are essentially restating the old saying:
>"Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan."
Re: The Untold History of Arduino
#10It makes a lot of sense that they forked the project. If you're selling a hardware product, like hell you're giving someone else administrative command over the code base that you're going to have to pay money to support. The code that your product's five star rating relies on.
push request #800020201 "Hey, Hernando, think you can push that update to Wiring now, we're paying quite a lot in support time here. The LEDs aren't blinking since you pushed that update to support EEPROM chips from the 80s"
It's the same reason Apple keeps their code to their hardware. I think it's a brillant business move, and anyone thinking of releasing low-level open-source code as a primary component of a hardware project should imitate it.
Also, did I miss the part in the article where Wiring and its boards were set up to become a huge success without Arduino's clever marketing and business plan? It seems like it was doomed to have "huge successes", like one class in one university out of thousands.
The guy should 100% get more credit, and if this happened to me I would always be a little hurt about it, but at the same time, would it be a big deal if it had never extended past a thesis somewhere? Would it matter if Arduino hadn't been a bunch of really clever people?