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Comment by mbanzi | Hacker News Reader

Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. 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.. The R&D on the Professional products eventually benefits everyone. I strongly disagree with your statement

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Not sure if you're as naive as your comments here, or just spouting the standard jargon, but even "We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering" and " Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology" are in complete disagreement. "They never interfere" - right... I don't doubt you strongly disagree, but history says you're wrong. Maybe Arduino will be the exception but I wouldn't bet on it. You took the money; you made the deal. If ever it comes to a decision that would negatively impact your investors or hold to the original ideals, which way do you think it will go?

That depends entirely on how much control the investors have. For a company as old and established as Arduino and for only $22 million, I’d guess it’s not all that much.

Don't waste time disagreeing with people on social media, just prove them wrong by doing the right thing. People are really downhearted by how things have turned out in the tech industry, but maybe someday we will point to Arduino as one of the companies who turned that around. Good luck!

To word this differently... We here on HN have seen this go wrong 1000 times. But we hope Arduino is the project that manages to accept VC funding and still stay true to its opensource maker roots.

I believe in mentioning origins the parent is referencing your unceremonious fork of the Wiring project

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.

http://arduinohistory.github.io/

> we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering

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.

Have you discussed this with your VCs? Which methods of maximizing revenue have they agreed you will be leaving on the table in perpetuity?

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.

Hey thanks for commenting here. I think many people in hn don't realize that Foss projects maintained and managed by a company are used to further a commercial goal otherwise ardunio would go under and then it doesn't matter the state of the Foss stuff. If in the future for whatever reason the sentiment for the Foss portion changes the community can always fork it, or continue development. That's the beauty of open source software.

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?

Glad to see you chime in here. Just curious, is Arduino setup so that the community could takeover if you did somehow go pure enterprise and abandon hobbyists? If I recall, things are pretty open source.

Everything except the name is properly opensource for the OG arduino (Arduino Uno).

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.

I love Arduino! How can I help the Arduino project, I live in Norway.

> They never interfere

They never interfere today, but we all know what happens when money dries up and VCs want some return on their money.

You innovated the hell out of Hernando Barragán.

You do realize this is what people always say when this happens? Nothing you said is reassuring, it’s basically “trust us guys”

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