I predict they'll go after microcontroller manufacturers first. "Do you want your dev boards supported by the Arduino Ecosystem? Pay us 10% of revenue, and then we'll talk."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 :-)