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Comment by MrJohz | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit odd that most of this article is various claims from one of Arduino's competitors being taken at face value, especially when the EFF spokesperson generally seems to think the new terms broadly make sense, albeit with some criticisms.

It sounds like Adafruit are just trying to sow some outrage here.

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Adafruit is not an arduino competitor. They sell arduinos

They sell Arduino compatible boards (amongst other things) from what I gather, so yes, they would be competitors.

I was very confused when the article referred to

> Chief microcontroller rival Adafruit

Implying that Adafruit makes their own competing microcontrollers, which sure would have been news to me.

Edit: sees sibling posted at the same time. Well that would explain it.

Historically neither of them made any microcontrollers. Arduino shipped Atmel and Raspberry Pi chips. Adafruit has boards with a variety of microcontrollers from various brands on them.

This is different now that Arduino is Qualcomm-owned and ships Qualcomm silicon, of course.

To be fair they're shipping Qualcomm+STM silicon now.

They also sell feather and a bunch of other vaguely similar stuff and have their own "maker" ecosystem (think CircuitPython). I like Adafruit, but they are in many senses competitors to Arduino.

I understand adafruit's take at it. But I guess they are simply plain wrong when saying 'incompatible', at least from a pure license perspective for the HW/firmware.

As other pointed out, companies like Google demonstrate, how open source can be used in a rather aggressive commercial strategy. However, I think the good news is that that the open hardware stuff is not rocket science and maintenance hell at this point (without the new Qualcomm bits). I guess it is now for others to step up and make the ecosystem resilient. That is IMHO the power of open source in case it works.

Adafruit makes a ton Arduino libraries, and sells boards and starter kits. They also make their own stuff, and sell things from their other "competitors." I got my first arduino from them over 19 years ago.

Their real competitor is sparkfun, but I never heard them say anything to put them down.

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