Oh :-(
Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.
Every time a cool little company gets VC funding, you know that the free and opensource projects will dry up, and before long they'll be making premium high end products and suing anyone who tries to compete.
When the farmer came the first time the turkey hid full of fear, but the farmer came and instead of death and fear brought food. The farmer took care of the turkey, feeding him well, making sure he had a warm place to stay. All along the chickens warned the turkey, the farmer was going to come and eat him, but the Turkey thought.
"The Farmer is so nice, he takes care of me so much and loves me, these chickens don't have any idea what they were talking are talking about. They are just foolish scared chickens", the turkey thought.
Then one fateful November day instead of a bag of feed the farmer brought an axe....
Many tech people have seen this happen over and over again, they know that when the VCs come, eventually so will the axe.
You don’t know Arduinos master plan.
VC's don't like to leave money on the table, and there's a long history of companies going back on their promises to their users in the years following accepting VC money.
https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/4415094490770-L...
Not-legally-binding tl;dr The "duino" suffix could be a trademark issue. If you rename it and you keep your hardware designs open source you're fine. Otherwise contact them for a proprietary use license.
And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.
My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.
Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.
Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days.
Eg.:
Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second.
Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...
If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv)
With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.
A lot of the hobbyist stuff is moving to MicroPython / CircuitPython, PlatformIO is eating the more hardcore market, and professionals will just stick to whatever RTOS & HAL they were already using.
But if anyone tries to ship arduino code in a commercial product, they'll want royalties.
Or if any microcontroller maker wants to be supported by the ecosystem, they'll also want royalties.
And the royalty levels will be low because there are competing ecosystems of tools - but across such a huge market of embedded commercial electronics, I think they'll still do very well.
I disagree. In companies with an embedded software team, no. But in companies where software isn't a focus of what the company does, there are plenty of bits of arduino code shipped on millions of devices. For example, my Beko branded fridge (they sell 3 million fridges per year). And my unbranded motion-sensitive security light.
Arduino had more impact at making people aware that tinkering with controllers might be fun (or profitable) than the actual amount of tinkering with Arduinos (or clones) suggests. Aiming for that "not the core job description" subset of professionals seems like a very good match.
As a professional embedded systems engineer, I'm not the "ideal Arduino customer." But having the arduino ecosystem available means that I can build a one-off for a client in a matter of minutes when it would otherwise take days or weeks. That means I become the "embedded mercenary" that they like and want to hire again :-)
> After the first $32 million Series B financing received in 2022, “This investment will allow us to further fuel our transformational platform initiative for professional customers, lowering the barriers to entry in IoT and AI by providing a continuum from hardware to Cloud,” says Arduino’s CEO Fabio Violante.
But professionals have different requirements, and are willing to pay for tools that work well. Opening up a professional channel only makes sense if it's buttressed by a large ecosystem outside, with the pressure to keep using Arduino, because it's well-known, hardware is tried and true, hiring is easy, etc.
So, if anything, Arduino the company now has more incentives to make Arduino widely accessible among kids, students, hobbyists, etc.
Got it.
But keep in mind that people that talk in buzzwords are often not reliable.
We do sell services but we try to avoid bullshit terms like "servitization"
Just pinky promise me that you won't make Arduino IDE a subscription :)
I know this is written for the investors, but it makes your potential professional customers feel a little sick.
The Arduino corporation has been a great benefit to open source but it's also a classic trope of an advisor taking credit (and profits) for his students' work.
You're not disagreeing with parent commenter and could both be correct!
> Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere
At some point, they will expect, then demand returns on their investments, then your focus will mostly be on the professional offering, while the community product gets less love.
It's not a condemnation of your as an individual or your organization: this cycle has played out many times via VC or acquisition.
What will happen if you don't make the returns they expect? Do you have a controlling share, or is it possible for them to fire you and replace you with a more compliant CEO?
This sort of thing tends to be a collaboration, until the growth doesn't meet expectations.
I'm also biased since I'm building a vc backed product as well.
Super stoked to see how your professional and enterprise offerings turn out. Do you have a public roadmap anywhere?
For some more recent boards, there are proprietary components and binary tools and blobs - notably the Expressif board packages for the ESP8266 and ESP32's. At least some of the blame for that is with the chip manufacturers and not the Arduino project.
They never interfere today, but we all know what happens when money dries up and VCs want some return on their money.
If you dig even deeper you will find http://arduinohistory.github.io describing how Massimo Banzi stole open source project from one of his students.
YOU are not going down that path.
But investors are now the ones shaping the paths.
Arduino is hardly the first company to take on VC money. Everyone here is intimately familiar with how it always plays out, and the dynamics that will force around even the most pure hearted leader.
It's best not to say anything, you are only going to look foolish trying to explain to a bunch of veteran tech heads how "This time its different!".
Now it's doing more damage by continuing to push an "Arduino" ecosystem separated from the realities of building production grade software.
Even if they completely reverse their open-source approach, I’d still be grateful for the tremendous contribution Arduino has made to education.
By the way, the best way to support Arduino as an individual is to only buy official boards directly from their site.
Arduino started out as an open-source project, with further development funded by the sale of physical hardware. They did not need tens of millions of VC funding for that, and they independently developed the "cool stuff" people here care about. Unlike most startups seen here, they were not selling stuff at a loss in the hope of conquering the world and somewhere along the way hopefully figuring out a way to make money. Arduino could've probably continued doing this for decades, but instead they stagnated and were leapfrogged by their competitors.
They only need to raise VC funding in order to expand into new markets because they want to pivot towards "professional engineers with enterprise-scale applications".
- Oracle
- Broadcom
- Walmart
- MicroStrategy
These companies have most enshittified products than most other companies, so it is not the VC money that leads to it.
Look, I had fun with Arduino back in the days, but in 2023 you folks simply don't have an attractive product range anymore. When I open Adafruit's website I am almost guaranteed to immediately be greeted by a handful of brand new products which immediately look interesting to me. When I open the Arduino website I have to do a lot of effort to even find a product lineup, and even when I manage to finally get there it isn't at all obvious what I should buy and why.
I own several Arduino products, and I genuinely forgot you existed. For your sake I sincerely hope I just live in a massive filter bubble and am massively mistaken about the hobbyist market.
Accepting VC funding 99% of the time means that is the route they plan to go.