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Comment by nickpinkston | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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