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"
Processing was/is graphics-centered, so that's where Arduino's term "sketch" come from, if you ever wondered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Processing_screen_shot.pn...
And some industry players still are. Looking at you, Broadcom and Qualcomm.
Arduino was a nice beginner friendly IDE for sure that eliminated the need for make files or reading documentation for GCC, but the existing ecosystem was definitely not closed source.
Arduino (the original AVR boards anyway) have always relied on GCC, and not just that but the entire open source chain that already existed for AVR-GCC. I'm sure they contribute back (I guess "sure" is an exaggeration), but it worked pretty darn well already.
Arduino, for me, replaced emacs for an IDE. The main reasons I use it are because I don't need to write a makefile, and the integrated serial port. Those are good enough features that I still use the IDE even though I haven't touched a real Arduino in a decade or more. But I work alone and don't usually have more than a few thousand lines of code so it's not too complex to manage.
By the mid 2000s open-source hardware again became a hub of activity due to the emergence of several major open-source hardware projects and companies, such as OpenCores, RepRap (3D printing), Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun, and Open Source Ecology. In 2007, Perens reactivated the openhardware.org website, but it is currently (February 2025) inactive. [0]
It's just a HAL and an IDE, with a truckload of user/third party supplied libraries for various modules, sensors, etc.
Plus, every sizable MCU/dev-board vendor supplies a Arduino HAL implementation (so called Core) for their board/mcu/module (or it's done by enthusiastic community).
The point of the GP was to refute the claim that they were started “before open source was cool”.
It's Atmel that derives massive benefit from GCC, or whoever implemented AVR backend for GCC.
Arduino doesn't - strictly speaking - depend on GCC, it could (and does) use any toolchain that is supplied by MCU vendor.
And it just happens so that many MCU vendors do often use GCC as part of their toolchain. Arduino just bundles that with vendor supplied tools for flashing, etc, like avrdude.
Which is to say - it's the MCU vendors that derive the main benefit from GCC.
Arduino will just happily use whatever toolchain MCU vendors provide.
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).
It's an abridged timeline. Brevity because the point is the date, not the fine detail.
But since I don't care to argue on the internet... edited.
Eh? What do you mean it would be interesting to see? It's well-documented. Not controversial or hidden.
The HTTP protocol yes. But also the browser/editor app, WorldWideWeb, a web server for it, and the URL scheme, are literal Berners-Lee inventions. HTML may be an SGML language but it's his SGML language.
He's not claiming and nobody is claiming he invented hypertext (he would say Ted Nelson and Alan Kay).
He absolutely invented the fundamentals of the end-to-end web technology as we use it. There was no functioning internet open-hypermedia system before 1990. It's just not in question and it's kind of disingenuous to imply he didn't do much.
(Defining down "invent" in this way is also disingenuous to all inventors, who all do their work in the context of prior art)
The point is that if you want to do something, you are probably more likely to do it well with lots of other doers. Not followers.
-- statement from Qualcomm without a single human being's name on it
Could have almost been written by AI, but the content seemed so angry that I think it must have been a corporate spokesperson who just woke up, read people being concerned and angrily hacked away at the keys at the keyboard.
Except that half their boards and the entire cloud platform aren't open source at all.
E. g. qualcom stepwise swallowing the infrastructure and pulling the chair under the hobbyists community.
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.
The license change isn't a dealbreaker, but Qualcomm still consists of 900000 insectoid lawyers pretending to be humans, and their hivemind thinks "open source" is some kind of disease.
The "best case scenario" was that Arduino would get Qualcomm as a whole to be more open to small devs. The "worst case scenario" was that Qualcomm would get Arduino to be as bad as Qualcomm, and you'd have to "talk to sales" to get an SDK for your development board.
So far, we're not getting the "best case scenario". So keep the pitchforks at hand.
Of course, if you weren't already making that assumption when Qualcomm bought them, I don't know what to tell you ...
There is no such thing as being purchased by a large company while retaining anything non-evil. If anything this is the remaining employees who were lied to their face about remaining whatever they were
Show me a time anyone has ever remained themselves after being purchased by Qualcomm.
It’s over for Arduino.
For my work projects, I use Teensy because it's the screaming-est processor, and I use its computing power. The cost isn't exorbitant since it's typically re-usable unless you want to turn something into a permanent installation.
I suggest play with what you've got until you get sick of it, or run into a hardware need that would be better served by another processor or board. Or choose a new board when your R4 goes into something that you want to keep.
I've tried to maintain a "platform agnostic" approach, where I stick with the general Arduino API and processor-independent libraries as much as possible, and only drop down into the vendor-specific libraries when there's a real performance reason. This makes it easier to switch boards if needed -- a lifesaver during the chip shortage, and possibly important under present day supply chain uncertainty.
Doing it this way will give you the benefits of drawing from a broader range of tutorials and docs, while also providing a gentler learning curve on working with the low level chip-specific stuff.
Still can be reflashed if you have access to the right pins, but I believe there are more security features built into the later generations of these chips (plus some security fixed from the original 2350 design).
> 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.
Or is this Arduino trying to save face?
> 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 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”).
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
Also - given how many tech companies involved in AI have done an about-face on military usage of it, I'm increasingly seeing it as an empty promise.
what is new here?
IMO it would have just been easier to simply sign it. (With signing I mean mentioning who specifically wrote a blog entry; and also ideally the time as well.)
on linkedin, i think it just says "adafruit" i will learn more and see if i can go in and add it post-post..
how is that shady for ya.
remember when y'all both started blocking people on twitter for calling out data breaches? hrm, lmao.
You are basically saying that "past experience means future trust". How does this relate? I mean, a company xyz can have been doing great in the past, but may go extinct lateron for any reason. See Sun and then who owns Java nowadays. I much preferred Sun over Oracle really.