Arduino-Org: “Rename this fork and use less confusing versioning”
github.com
github.com
The 1 minute primer:
"In short, there are two companies calling themselves “Arduino” at the moment. One, Arduino LLC was founded by [Massimo Banzi], [David Cuartielles], [David Mellis], [Tom Igoe] and [Gianluca Martino] in 2009, runs the website arduino.cc, and has been directing and releasing the code that makes it all work. Most of these folks had been working together on what would become the Arduino project since as early as 2005.
The other “Arduino” used to be called Smart Projects and was the manufacturing arm of the project founded and run by [Gianluca Martino]. Smart Projects changed their name to Arduino SRL in November 2014. (A “Società a responsabilità limitata” is one form of Italian limited-liability company.) They have been a major producer of Arduino boards from the very beginning and recently registered the domain arduino.org."
Read more at HAD (http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/)
For background (before the recent turmoil) there is a documentary about arduino. https://vimeo.com/18539129
Am I incorrect in my observation?
Was Arduino supposed to be an open name that anyone can adopt, a la Unix and all the varieties that are derived from that name (HPUX, Linux, BSD Unix, UnixWare, Unix System V, etc)?
Arduino against Arduino: Founder argue about the company
English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
German: http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruen...
> By the way, you (meaning the people who started this phony organization and made this phony fork) know that you've made the front page of Hacker News, right? If you continue, there will be no shortage of people who will constantly point out that you're a bunch of wannabe fakers.
It's sad that HN is perpetuating this behavior.
Excerpt:
When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders (myself [Massimo Banzi] , David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino) decided to create a company that would own the trademarks and manage the business side of Arduino: Manufacturers would build and sell boards, Arduino would get a royalty from them like in many other businesses, such as in the fashion world. This happened in April 2008 when Arduino LLC was founded and the bylaws of the company specified that each of the five founders would transfer to this company any ownership of the Arduino brand. At the end of 2008 when Arduino was about to register the trademark in the US and worldwide, unknown to us and without any advance notice, Gianluca’s company Smart Projects — our main boards manufacturer — went ahead and registered the Arduino name in Italy and kept this news for himself for almost two years.
After the process of registering in the US was over and our lawyer tried to extend the trademark to the rest of the world, he realised that somebody had registered it already in Italy. We (Tom, David, David, and I) were shocked and demanded explanations. Gianluca reassured us that this was done to protect our collective investment. We were friends (or so we thought), so based on this agreement we kept working together for years, received royalties while quietly trying to bring the trademark back into the Arduino company through endless discussions that dragged on while Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn’t even get a salary out of it).
As the project became more successful and sales increased, the attempts at regaining control of the Italian trademark registration became more and more difficult with larger and larger demands made to us while Gianluca effectively vetoed us from either bringing in other manufacturers or get any external investment. We made headway with Arduino creating a lot of innovation, pushing the boundaries of open source hardware, hiring a lot of talented people around the world and ultimately building an amazing community around the arduino.cc website.
———
0. http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
There was a disagreement, and one founder went his own way. The story is clearly messy and very unfortunate for the Arduino founders, but there's nothing "phony" or "fake" here.
Smart Projects LLC has been acting in bad faith for at least seven years (registering the trademark in Italy after having pledged to transfer the IP to Arduino LLC).
This happened mostly because "Dell" was the only manufacturer of "Windows" systems for a while, and didn't really appreciate that "Microsoft" wanted to license "Windows" on other hardware. Add to it that the original "Dell" founder has actually sold the lot to a third party with no previous history, who clearly does not care about the community.
http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
Not really. It would be more like Dell splitting into two companies, one for hardware one for software, and then later not really getting along and fighting over the name.
It seems to me they have a very strong case for infringement based on using the exact same business name. Again, here in the US, even similar sounding business names are open to be sued:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244249
http://the-llc-company.com/form-llc/trademark-infringement-b...
The case that pretty much started it all, so much so, now the rules of infringement are often referred to as the "The Polaroid Factors":
https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tmcas...
For example, the iFone vs. iPhone conflict in Mexico doesn't affect the rest of the world.
I know that these "+1" aren't entirely useless in that they show support - but people can show support by other means, and on other websites (for example, by simply upvoting the HN submission). This just plagues any possible discussion and turns the whole thing into a circus.
Of course, any form of moderation will make people complain even more, so I can understand why nothing has been done yet. Edit: Maybe a feature to fold nonconstructive comments would be a partial solution at least. In cases like this, they can even be automatically detected.
That's not linked to or visible from Github, and assumes the repository owner watches HN or reddit or what have you.
Other systems have ways to simply note that you're affected by an issue without having to spam it, but Github has nothing for that: subscriptions to a bug thread are (AFAIK) not available to the repository owner, and there's no "+1" button, the only way to show interest or that you're affected is a bump comment. Which admittedly isn't nice, but how else is the repository owner going to know this issue affects more than just one person living in a cave on a lost island in the middle of the pacific? Issues are not treated based solely on their "popularity" or on the number of people they affect, but that's an important signal when prioritising.
> Maybe a feature to fold nonconstructive comments would be the solution - but how to determine which ones are nonconstructive?
Repository owners can remove comments, FWIW. Of course unless they also lock the thread that will most likely lead to an avalanche of now outraged claims of censorship.
What's just as annoying is that as far as I'm aware, he has never admitted that he's been wrong about anything. Ever.
single line filter evasion text here
Instead, you would have to add a line that either gives more depth to your opinion (why do you think it would help?) or that just serves as use,es filler. I bet many people would opt for the latter, as it is easier to write.
Unfortunately, I don't think we have technology to measure the amount of content in a comment.
Disclosure: I work with the team that built ZenHub, please forgive my shameless plug :) figured the discussion went off on a tangent anyway, might as well resolve the side issue so we can return to the matter at hand!
Make it private?
I did end up picking up an Arduino board to play with later on, but I am really glad that I learned hardware at a lower level than the prepackaged boards, that way I am not tied to the power struggles of the hardware manufacturers.
As a side note, I also found that designing the hardware portion is as rewarding or in some cases more rewarding than the final solution that the hardware will be used for.
Doesn't each one send an email to the project owner and everyone who's commented on the issue? Are we back in the days of AOL-style "Me too!"?
How many of them are from this HN link?
By default yes. It's possible to unsubscribe from a thread, and only send emails for threads in which you've participated. Depending on your workflow, the latter can be a boon to your inbox.
> Are we back in the days of AOL-style "Me too!"?
We've never left it.
https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/ ... real Arduino
https://github.com/arduino-org/Arduino/ ... unknown fork?
Beside that Arduino IDE was itself forked from the Processing IDE. It's a very basic IDE, with basic syntax highlighting and just 4-5 toolbar buttons.
I would prefer e.g. IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition for Arduino and RPi development.
edit: the headline has been updated; and I found an article about the background: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
arduino-org/arduino is a hostile fork from 1 of the 5 original founders who was put in charge of the manufacturing spinoff, as a result of the other 4 members expressing a desire to end the exclusive manufacturing contract.
1. Make additional forks that are similar in name to the rogue fork to dilute.
2. Rename the original branch to branch-official or branch-llc which should be distinctive enough to keep it above the fray.
The Apache license has a Trademarks clause. But if the software name isn't Trademarked...
The GPLv2 doesn't cover forking, software name, or trademark. Go ahead and search it.
Nagios is the only software I can think of that has a clause that prevents you from forking it, with or without the same name.
http://assets.nagios.com/licenses/nagios_open_software_licen...
6. Trademarks. This License does not grant permission to use the trade names, trademarks, service marks, or product names of the Licensor, except as required for reasonable and customary use in describing the origin of the Work and reproducing the content of the NOTICE file.
I did not found gpl clause
FYI: The title has been updated, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334255
In this case, Arduino SRL (formerly Smart Projects, the arduino manufacturing spinoff) has forked the IDE, and significantly up-revved the version number to try and get people to move away from the original team's IDE.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(software_development)
Only one I can think of off the top of my head is egcs forking off gcc so devs have a place to put their experimental branches.
I can't think of any project names at the moment, but I believe that most of the pre-Github "hostile" "forks" were due to a package being abandoned.
Also, remember that egcs started out as a merger of several devs' individual experimental forks containing stuff like new frontends, new architectures, and optimizations for specific processors. The projects that went into egcs were all pre-existing projects; egcs was just a consolidation.
Edit: Just realized you said non-hostile. Yeah, not so much, prior to GitHub most forks that weren't to try to take ownership were either experimental in nature, to continue development on an abandoned project, or in order to develop some features that the original authors disagreed with (semi-hostile). I'm not sure you can classify picking up a dead project as a hostile action, but it isn't exactly benign either. As for experimental branches those were usually non-hostile, but at the same time if they bore fruit they would typically get merged back into the upstream so not really a fork in the truest sense of the word, but more like a really long running branch.
I think the IO.JS vs. Node.JS thing could be named a hostile fork, as could the MySQL vs. MariaDB situation.
Nothing good can come of this. (Especially for a project such as Arduino, which really really doesn't compete on technology, but survives on their community userbase. Bringing this tit-for-tat public risks alienating the only feature they have.)
I think the intent of linking to this page was to highlight the fact that a popular project is being forked in a potentially confusing and divisive manner... not really highlight the content of the comment made.
This rule kicks in particularly when users start to complain that an existing title is misleading. Otherwise that tends to dominate the thread. This is the dreaded title fever.
We don't always succeed in coming up with a neutral, accurate title, so there's a standing invitation to HN readers to suggest a better one. When someone does, we change it again. But if you want to be sure we see a suggestion (about anything, not just titles), send it to hn@ycombinator.com. There are too many posts on HN itself for us to read them all.