Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Seems fine. There's a Qualcomm SaaS platform you don't need that they have the boilerplate no-hacking clause on. And Arduinos are the same as always. Considering the EFF and Arduino positions in favour, both of whom have done a lot for open-source stuff, I really can't be bothered that Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content.

View on HN

> Adafruit is trying to drum up some marketing content

This was evident to me when their original post "yada yada yada'd" over the details to make things in the agreement sound sinister.

Agree completely and I was writing arduino libraries almost 20 years ago

My first Arduino was something like 15 years ago as well, a Duemilanove. I suspect my parents still have it. I'm not saying nothing can change over time, but there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me.

Same story on this side and same feelings. It doesn't matter to the mob, the perception is all. Who cares that there's a website which is not open source, you don't buy an arduino for the website. You buy it because it's cheap and easy to use. Otherwise everyone would still be flashing atmel 8s

>there's always one controversy after another online these days in software communities and I think rather than trust the latest mob I'm going to trust the guy who's been serving me well for more than a decade. These openness purity tests are really not for me.

Thanks you! Sad that HN gets ideologically captured in the same mob behavior instead of thinking logically and practically.

The logical thinking is: are they going to make me dependent on some cloud service to develop for Arduino?

Don't know what Adafruit has a problem with, but the above is my problem.

They can't do that. Maybe they can launch new versions later where they lock it down, but then we will just use something else.

The latter is what this discussion is about. Will future Arduino released things still be usable for our means, or do we need to ditch them.

Yep, it's fine to not consider future versions when you do say hobby projects, but I worked on a commercial Arduino based project that's supposed to run on top of poles on solar. For that I very much care if they plan to make it cloud dependent... and I don't assume sanity on part of management.

> I worked on a commercial Arduino based project

Me too.

What product?

Essentially a TCP/IP based pager for the event industry.

Mine is even more boring - and on hold - but it’s reading data from some sensors and sends it over NB-IoT to a server.

> and on hold

Due to the Qualcomm issue, or something else? I'm working for a small company, so we will likely just ignore it.

No no. Customer got acquired the 32th time (been working for them for a long time occasionally) and they’re “reevaluating the ongoing projects.”

>The logical thinking is: are they going to make me dependent on some cloud service to develop for Arduino?

The logic to me is "how can they do that?". You don't need a cloud service to program a microcontroller and they can't force that upon you even if they'd want to since the arduino board is not an iPhone.

> "how can they do that?"

License future important libraries only for use via their cloud toolchain?

Stop contributing support to non-cloud toolchain and/or intentionally break it?

Slip more restrictive licensing into new easy to use features (like a vision service) that taint combined products?

Never underestimate a company's ability to pay lawyers to restrict freedom.

How? Libraries are all open source by the community. Arduino AVR doesn't need proprietary microcode to boot= and run.

Last Arduino I worked with is one of those ARMs that pretend they're an AVR, for example.

The issue with that is that they don't even own the (exclusive) rights to "their" libraries. They are nothing more than a package repository.

They could very much force it on you, for new units at least - depending on what micro is on the boards, they could potentially very easy start shipping them with locked bootloaders (and disabled JTAG/SWD porrts) that would only run binaries that are signed by them.

They could potentially have their software load a unexpectedly re-flash existing units with a locked bootloader too, it would just be harder to keep the key secret (because the tool flashing the new bootloader on the first time would need to know it)

How the hell would such a thing still suitable for development, which is what their primary use case is now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com