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Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

I feel terrible for Hernando Barragán who invented Wiring, only for it essentially to be stolen by his advisor Massimo Banzi and renamed Arduino, leaving out the inventor. Given that Banzi and the Arduino team never referred any credit to Wiring, I can only assume it was due to ego reasons since they credited Banzi's previous project as the source of Arduino.

https://arduinohistory.github.io/

Then the Arduino team had their own further battle about rights. The Arduino folks don't seem to be the most honest of folks. I have always avoided Arduino due to this history.

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I have zero qualms about buying cheap Arduino clone boards because of this.

Although lately I've found myself requiring basic IP/wi-fi for almost every usecase, so I've turned to ESP8266/ESP32 boards instead of AVR boards.

Here's hoping for a low-cost wi-fi-enabled Raspberry Pi Pico. I wonder what the wi-fi IP licensing cost is like for companies that actually need to pay attention to things like that.

There are RP2040 based boards with wifi are starting to come out. While they aren't horrendously expensive, they are double or triple the cost of a regular base raspberry pi pico model.

Here is one I have seen, but I haven't used or played with it.

https://thepihut.com/products/challenger-rp2040-wifi-chip-an...

"The WiFi section on this board is based on the Espressif ESP8285 chip which basically is an ESP8266 with 1MByte FLASH memory integrated onto the chip".

I suppose I'm wishing for an Espressif-like approach. A (low-power?) RPxxxx core fully assigned to running a Wi-Fi software stack, in the same RPxxxx chip, along with having the analogue RF aspects handled by the same chip/package.

I've found ESP8266 boards really suit my needs more than a "full" Arduino boards, just a few wires and some built in wi-fi is all I want for the most part so far with how I've been using / playing them.

I completely agree, with the exception of wanting easy support for powering from a lipo battery and also charging that battery without disconnecting it. This has led me to use the Adafruit Feather RP2040 lately because it has a builtin lipo charger and will automatically switch between USB and battery power as needed, but of course it doesn't work for projects that need WiFi. I'm hoping that we'll get a board that easily combines the two soon.

Oh I didn’t know about the lipo… did some googling and that seems really handy/ got me thinking.

That explains why I haven’t found many battery powered Arduino options…. it is better on other boards.

Well yeah I mean "Arduino" is just a couple #defines to make a sort of custom C++ version. After a couple months playing with it, most people shouldn't need anything Arduino anymore.

While it's regrettable if Massimo broke his trust, this is open source software/hardware, and its ethos is about sharing and forking the designs, so you can't really "steal" it. Also for context, Wiring was a further development of the open source Processing language, and Hernando is no more a "thief" for doing that.

Also, the first inventor is only one part of any product, and it's hard to argue that Massimo did wrong to the community by popularizing Arduino, and people still know what Wiring is.

The point is that there was no reason not to just contribute to Wiring and take it from there. The nefarious thing is that they took the project and rewrote its history to make it seem as if it was their own work, meanwhile still taking new Wiring development and incorporating it into Arduino, all without credit. So it was about control and ego. I would assume that even some open source licenses were broken.

Also, Banzi wrote this:

https://blog.arduino.cc/2013/07/10/send-in-the-clones/

lamenting this exact thing when it came to people doing it to Arduino.

Great link! Thanks.

Slightly off topic but in Banzi's article (subheading Counterfeits) he mentions the now well known problem of Amazon cohousing different manufacturers products and then effectively sending a random one to the client. I think this is interesting as it still seems to be a problem nearly a decade later.

I would say proper attribution and credit is even more important in open source development than elsewhere.

My day job takes credit for my work, but compensates me in money. Pretty much the only "pay" for the vast majority of open source work is credit.

> it's hard to argue that Massimo did wrong to the community by popularizing Arduino

So who made that argument? I haven't seen anyone claim his marketing efforts were unethical.

But let's say you wrote a significant part of a book. I took your work, completed it, and published it as solely my work. It becomes wildly successful. Have I done anything wrong?

Something being open source typically doesn't mean you can copy and use it without attribution.

This kind of intellectual theft is extremely common in academia, particularly between <an immigrant from a different country> vs. <someone who is a national wherever this happens>.

Recommended movie, Dark Matter [1].

1: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416675/

Source?

And suddenly that twinge of guilt I felt when buying knockoff Arduino boards is... gone.

Ah this is sad, and makes me too want to avoid arduino. Wonder if those below would consider similar if they knew.

I think that it's fair to consider Arduino's complicated history (the legal battles, the Wiring history, etc.) while also acknowledging how revolutionary it's been to hobbyist electronics.

I'm not sure what would be improved by trying to avoid Arduino at this point. Especially considering that it has spawned a very large and versatile ecosystem: all of the open source libraries that have been created for it (some random amazing ones: [0], [1]), the compatible shields and accessories [2], tutorials & courses, etc.

It remains an extremely important and useful platform, and for good reason.

[0] https://github.com/Avamander/arduino-tvout

[1] https://github.com/sensorium/Mozzi

[2] https://www.adafruit.com/category/21

It's open source, you can't really steal open source software unless it was never "free and open source" to begin with.

You can still be a jerk by making millions of dollars without crediting the work of your own grad student

And we can still piggyback a zillion projects off the IDE, the libraries and HAL, and other artifacts of this complicated and sometimes disgraceful software project, it’s not like using Nazi experiment data to engage in Arduino ecosystem pilferage, with proper credit given to {project name}

Should we abide our lives by what lawyers say is right or wrong?

Assuming what lawyers say is a reflection of what the governing law states or allows for, yes?

Want to reign in the lawyers? Start with your governments.

Thanks, did not know about this shady history.

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