Federico Musto has stepped down as Arduino CEO | Hacker News Reader

Federico Musto has stepped down as Arduino CEO

techcrunch.com

51 pointstdrnd28 comments

TL;DR major shareholders want to make profit, therefore found a way to kick out visionary CEO to replace with MBA/financial CEO. Without a publicliy valid reason they just complained about the CV, a document which barely ever is 100% honest. But since the old CEO doesn't seem to make a fuss of it, the severance package probably was good enough.

The guy claimed to have a PhD from MIT and an MBA from NYU, when he never even went to either school. Are you defending that on the basis that everyone lies on their resume?

> Without a publicliy valid reason they just complained about the CV, a document which barely ever is 100% honest.

At least in Germany lying in the CV is considered as a very serious issue. What you called "barely 100% correct" would thus probably be called "fraud" in Germany.

Can you be more specific? This is the first time I hear someone say that. I'm educated to individually write CVs for each company related to what they need. I never needed to provide any proof either.

> Can you be more specific?

Here are some articles about this topic (all in German):

> http://hoesmann.eu/im-lebenslauf-gelogen-was-sind-die-jurist...

> https://arbeitgeber.monster.de/hr/personal-tipps/rekrutierun...

> http://www.spiegel.de/karriere/luegen-bei-der-bewerbung-das-...

> https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/karriere/tipps/article1349518...

Principally if a lie in your CV is uncovered, you can immediately be fired (even if it was not fraud in the legal sense; being a relevant reason to give you the job suffices), even if you worked for years in the company. So be honest.

> I'm educated to individually write CVs for each company related to what they need.

I am not a native English speaker - so I am not sure what you are trying to say here.

> I never needed to provide any proof either.

Some time ago as a sick leave cover I was in a commission for a rather prestigious academic scholarship for students. I had a lot of exaggerations and concealments in the application forms and CVs to uncover. If someone uncovered such one in the selection interview, you could be sure that the candidate would not be selected. For example so many candidates who claim to be interested in opera - and so easy to check. Or so many candidates who claim to be seriously interested in Linux or Android - no, only having installed some GNU/Linux distribution or having rooted your phone is not what I consider as serious interest. Or some guy who claimed that for altruistic reasons he developed some math training app for iOS for disabled pupils - but concealing that it had in-app purchase. If he had honestly claimed there was interest in entrepreneurship, this would have been no problem (surely even very positive). But since he claimed he did it just out of social conscience and concealed the in-app purchase, this was a central reason why the commission did not trust his integrity and decided against giving him the scholarship.

Similar things also hold for job applications. Things will typically be checked in the job interview - especially if they are relevant for the job. So taking an example from one of the above articles: Don't claim that you apply because you are looking for new challenges if the honest reason is that you had trouble with the previous boss (the new employer can simply ask the old one if he suspects this reason). Also don't claim that you were on parental leave or travelling the world if you were unemployed at that time etc.

I honestly believe even many Germans don't know that, because I really never heard anybody saying something like this before. So thanks a lot, I certainly try to honor it now that I know it.

> I honestly believe even many Germans don't know that, because I really never heard anybody saying something like this before.

I would rather say that at least for jobs it is so deeply ingrained in German culture that most German would not even consider that somewhere else such a behavior is tolerated.

Are you serious..? That's pretty bad.

If I were a potential employer and I found out that you posted something saying that dishonest CV writing is a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon, I would never hire you..... maybe you should not leave this comment up, if there's a chance that people in your professional sphere know your HN username. Just my suggestion.

"visionary CEO" ? here is an overview.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2017/08/02/arduino-federico-musto-...

I am confused : is this the evil Arduino or the non-evil one?

I thought they were back to being the same thing again?

It's not really evil as such. It's more the intersection of money and greed.

Musto has lied about a lot of things (some more bizarre than others), and clearly gives zero thoughts about the community side of things. Banzi and co have also some interesting history when it comes to acknowledgement of Arduino's history, especially in relation to the original wiring project and processing.

There isn't really an evil or non-evil Arduino. The original Arduino is a modification to Hernando Barragan's Wiring board to support the Atmega8 chipset. Banzi was Barragan's supervisor. Banzi and a bunch of other guys at IDII forked the project (for reasons Barragan says he doesn't know) and founded Arduino, eventually building the Uno, still based on the Wiring board.

The Nano and Pro Mini followed, and when Arduino realised there was money to be made, proceeded to fall out with each other.

Now we're in a situation where both Arduino orgs are claiming to be open source, but only some products are open source. Deals have been made with companies that will only ever provide binary blobs and require NDAs that mean that there are Arduino products out there that will never be open source hardware.

If Arduino was to turn around and say, "Hey guys, the Arduino Uno, Nano and Pro Mini are open source. The Yun, ARM boards and others aren't", I think people would understand. Instead, Arduino uses ambiguity to hide it's open source status.

There's huge sums of money at stake, and that's what's driving it. The push from Maker Magazine and Adafruit may have put pressure on Musto to step down (or not), but it's not like Adafruit don't have their own competing boards, which makes it a little difficult for Adafruit to get too close without facing possible accusations of competitive badmouthing.

The push from Adafruit at least seemed rather bizarre and cynical to me. All of a sudden, they started caring about the open-source status of hardware that predated the Arduino split and using it as justification for why Musto was evil and needed to go. This wasn't something they'd cared about before. Indeed, when Bre Pettis and Makerbot went against their loudly-proclaimed principles and took their 3D printers (which borrowed heavily from other's open designs) closed source while hiding behind vague statements, Adafruit's response was to post a piece that compared the people who criticised Makerbot to "fundamentalists" who "blow things up" and claimed to be defending "open source innovation and polite disagreement" by doing so: https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-sour...

Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.

> Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.

There's a lot of this. People think there's huge sums of money to be made in open source hardware because of Arduino and Raspberry Pi. It's such a broken misconception (not just because most of Arduino and almost all of Raspberry Pi is closed source) it's almost laughable.

The people doing ok out of open hardware are people like Great Scott Gadgets, Simon Monk, RC2014, Digistump etc. None of these guys are warming their fires with spare $100 bills, but they're all doing amazing open source work and are making enough to eek out a living.

Open source hardware has all the money-making benefits of shooting yourself in the foot from the get go just like with Open source software, but with orders of magnitude higher startup costs. Sure, there can be successes, but those that are tend to be rarely fully open.

I find your post to be cynical.

The article you attribute to Adafruit is not written by them, they just linked to it from their blog, ostensibly as food for thought and discussion.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to interact with Limor and PT over email after they reached out to me in response to a project I'd posted on a forum. I found them to be gracious, supportive, and genuine, and based on the conversations we had I find your claim that they don't care about open-source hardware to be dubious.

There was no discussion. They systematically deleted comments that disagreed or that (correctly) interpreted Makerbot's comments as them going closed source. I personally had one deleted for pointing out that the "fundamentalists" were far politer and less damaging than Bre Pettis's own public shaming of newcomers to the open hardware community who merely had trouble understanding the proper format they should release their hardware files in, and that politely holding someone to their own standards isn't really fundamentalism. Suggestions from others that comparing opponents to terrorists is not in fact contributing to polite disagreement got similarly short shrift.

@makomk the only reason we'd delete a comment is if you cursed, made personal attacks, etc.

we covered makerbot going closed-source on adafruit, including the class action lawsuit. https://blog.adafruit.com/?main_page=blog&s=makerbot additionally, we covered the close-sourcing of the arduino.org products (federico's arduino) - https://blog.adafruit.com/?s=%23freearduino

and just to be super-duper clear, my opinion is that it was a mistake for makerbot to go closed source the way they did.

I wonder what was the amount on the check, given that he claimed the business could grow from 15 to 50M https://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the...

Even if 50M was a bold one, I wouldn't have sold 50% of the company for less than 20M.

I fear Arduino is gonna pay a mortgage for a long time, mining its ability to innovate.

I thought everyone there already suspected he was the CEO? But I'm glad he finally came out with it. Must have taken some courage!

I genuinely can't tell if you're serious or not

Nope, it was a joke responding to the title itself only.

Doing business in open-source is hard.

I never really fancied Arduino as a business, then came the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I found my true love.

Arduino had the advantage of being open source from the components up - you could make your own boards, and many did. Unfortunately, it seems that more recent models like the Yùn have broken that promise: http://www.wifi4things.com/arduino-yun-what-is-under-the-hoo...

The Atmel chip design is not a free hardware design, though. There actually are chips whose design is libre, such as the Parallax Propeller (under GPL.)

The Raspberry Pi Foundation are not an open source organisation. They produce some open source software (I can't even find coherent source for the pixel desktop), but all of their boards are closed source.

What do you prefer about the Raspberry Pi Foundation?

What I actually meant that I switched platforms...

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