Comment by dammitcoetzee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dammitcoetzee | Hacker News Reader

It 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?

> 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?

That's not the argument. He's not upset Arduino was a huge success, nor is he all that upset that he is not involved with Arduino (as far as I can tell from this article, as it's written very professionally). The argument is that there is a rather significant fight between the co-founders of the Arduino project about who owns what of the Arduino brand. This article paints a picture that in reality, the product behind the brand was essentially ripped off of someone else's hard work with very little contributed back to the original project. I don't think anyone wouldn't start to feel rather frustrated if someone forked their open source project, made it hugely successful (while complying with licenses and other conditions, but without directly contributing back) and then started fighting within themselves over who "started the project all on their own".

It wasn't ripped off, it was directly forked from the underlying open source project, which is what you are supposed to do in open source if you want to take the project in a new direction and build a business on it. If you don't want people using your open source project drum roll don't open source it or change the license terms to prevent uses like this. I think many people in this thread have a very tenuous grasp of what open source is.

Forking an open source project != ripping it off people. I feel like Hacker News is the last place this distinction should have to be made.

The point of writing a thesis in academia is to share an idea and encourage other people adopt it. Other people did adopt it, that's what an effective thesis is.

Everything that was "stolen" here was either code or an idea which was made freely available for others. What people in this thread need to understand is that if you want to build a business, don't give away all your source code and ideas and act surprised when someone listens to you...

Correct attribution is traditionally required when forking.

Juniper sells hardware with support demands far beyond that of Arduino, and yet somehow maintains a productive downstream relationship with FreeBSD.

It's telling that Arduino is flailing now that they've extracted as much value as they possibly could out of the ideas they stole.

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