I briefly looked at their IDE and CLI repos and GitHub claims they're AGPL and GPL 3 respectively. I didn't see a CLA when I looked at their contribution guide.
Am I missing something here? What basis do they have to restrict users' rights to reverse engineer the software?
A missing piece of the puzzle that i feel is ommitted in Adafruits posting, is that the changes only affect the Arduino Cloud Services, which provide various github-like services for the arduino ecosystem. Looking over the changes with this in mind, it seems a lawyer just applied the same standard SaaS legal language to what is effectively a SaaS offering, pretty normal in most cases.
None of these changes will affect the Arduino open-source hardware project.
[EDIT] - confirmed: https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ all the legal language applies to the website, online services, forums, etc.
> The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”).
> 8.2 User shall not: translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements
So yeah, it seems like the definition of "Platform" is limited only to their hosted services.
As soon as it becomes a PR nightmare, they might just take that clause out.
Also Adafruit being a store, isnt there a matter of conflict of interest with posts like this?
https://arduinohistory.github.io
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
I have a special kind of hatred for people who steal other folks work (even if it is freely given) without any acknowledgement.
It would be just desserts if Barragan teamed up with some high profile lawyers and went after Qualcomm/Arduino like the Winklewoss twins went after Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.
I also wonder if anyone's backed/scraped the forums?
A DCO would be the more friendly option.
The libraries are written by random people, what Arduino does is adopt them after ~4-6 years of existing, slapping a "© Arduino LLC" on top and maybe fixing the packet manifest. The role of Arduino is a vendor and maintainer, they don't really are upstream for much things.
I don't really understand how what they try to achieve with these new "terms and conditions" is legally possible. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978802) They could release new software with different licenses, but they would need to rewrite most of the ecosystem to do that. Neither MIT, nor LGPL, nor GPL nor AGPL contain any reference to "terms and conditions" of one of the copyright holders, which should be followed on top of the license.
It takes a serious pair to "forbid reverse-engineering" on a platform aimed at tinkerers.
Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.
Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.
Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.
"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.
No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.
The feature was canned unceremoniously. Fin.
I spent SO MUCH TIME getting legal review to publish code.
One of my favorite battles was someone out there in the wild took the Microsoft boilerplate MIDL (MIT 2.0) and stripped the headers, licensing them as GPL. So our boilerplate MIDL files suddenly got ducked and we couldn't ship them any more.
Unless we had someone rewrite them.
In all seriousness, this is just appalling. This would make a good poison pill to prevent an opensource project from being used in such a corporation /s
Thanks for sharing! The sad part is, it's the qualcomm customers that pay for the end result.
Both of us were in the US, BTW.
The CEO of QCA? QCE? Don't remember. Was coming up to Seattle to rub elbows; there was to be a Q&A session afterwards. I told my friend Joe that if none of the employees would ask any hard questions, I would. They didn't and I did: you talk about open source, you talk about how important getting hardware into the world is, but my pal Matt can't get open data sheets or parts on tape. WHO DO I TALK TO?
He gave me someone, after many weeks of going around, they pointed me to the multi-thousand dollar IoT dev kits as the best option. Minimum order was like 1000 units.
For the rest of the world: it's a children cartoon with a grandpa beaver telling stories to his grandchildren, and has been immensely popular for decades.
So yeah, please do! War stories are always cool
None of them were the same. One of the best engineers I ever worked with, who I'll call Bill, had to reverse-engineer how to JTAG each one to re-flash them, since each tablet was slightly different and undocumented.
Bill was one of the guys in the late 90s, early 2000s that was cracking satellite cards for fun. He also reverse engineered a bunch of CANBUS stuff for another product group. Good times.
Anyways, we all knew it sucked.
Also, hacking satellite cards was fun, I kinda miss those days. Kids don't know how easy they have it now.
I was working on a semantic web parser engine tool.
2: One of my test rigs (not for 64 bit, just AllJoyn): https://www.flickr.com/photos/88509406@N00/53897032602
3: later evolution: https://www.flickr.com/photos/88509406@N00/53898288044
We had just added a TURN implementation to AllJoyn and set up a dev server. Not literally a small machine under someone's desk, but basically that. Maybe a two vCPU VM.
The DDoS was _very_ distributed. The DNS requests knocked Qualcomm off the air.
So we made that an opt-in compile-time feature for all BSPs going forward.
It was launched without NDK, which only came later in Android 2.0 after pressure from game developers, and to work around Dalvik being a primitive VM, thus NDK has always explicitly listed NDK use cases and nothing else.
It is the rest of the community that built false hope that only because it uses the Linux kernel, the NDK should offer more than it does.
Even the Android IoT project that initially started withouth the Java userland with the target to use a C++ based alternative instead (Brillo) didn't last long, and the final version Android Things, even required writing the device drivers in Java.
By the way, Trello drivers are language agnostic, talk via Android IPC with the kernel, and some of them are indeed Java based.
Turns out a kernel is just a kernel after all, and you really do want GNU+Linux, not just Linux.
edit: beagle bone black is an SBC apparently
"Arduino" is the name of the original, humble little microcontroller board.
It's a brand name for a series of boards ranging from simple and cheap, to quite elaborate.
It's a ecosystem of firmware development tools and libraries that revolve around the Arduino API, that has attracted a large community of participants including hobbyists and students but also third party developers. Adafruit and PJRC (Teensy) are exemplars. This may be its most valuable part, at the present time.
I've been developing with microprocessors since around 1984, when I hand-assembled 6502 code for an Apple II. I wrote my own assembler for an early microcontroller, and built my own device programmer. As tooling evolved, I stayed a step behind the most advanced commercial developers, for instance by using a free vendor-supplied assembler, and then following that vendor when they switched to C.
I got one of the original Arduino boards and started playing with it. To be honest, I've always preferred tools that were favored by hobbyists and students, including 8-bit BASIC, Turbo Pascal, HyperCard, Visual Basic, and now Python. For anybody who's familiar with the Python ecosystem, "Arduino" is like that today. It's grown way beyond its original implementation, but I think you have to experience both the technology and the community to fully appreciate it.
I believe the original humble board, and bare bones IDE, still deserve a place, because there's such a huge amount of tutorials and easy designs that use them. They're still a good place for a hobbyist to get started.
That's all you need to know. The old company no longer exists.
Never have been a fan of the programming style encouraged by the Arduino SDK/API, so hopefully this demise will allow someone to enter the space with something that is actually competitive with the Espressif devices. Have a decent API and connectivity, at the same time, unfathomable stuff. The Picos are closest, but the connectivity situation is a mess.
The RP2350 has two RISC-V cores (and two Cortex M33 cores).
The CPU cores aren't the problem (just use Hazard3) - it's all the rest, particularly the WiFi.
So we know with certainty that it's possible to make Wi-Fi hardware work in a blob-free fashion on a production grade MCU.
It's just rather boring to get all the ducks in a row to do it.
To work as part of a reasonably secure platform that still allows people to develop on it and responsibly sell consumer hardware based on it, yes, it's necessary.
If you don't use the "happy path" builds, the choice is yours, and the consequences are your own. Simple as.
Just do things properly - it only has to be done by the vendor anyway, and no one else needs to touch it.
Blobs are popular for a reason, and it's often for the sake of the user of the blob not the maker of the blob.
Which one?
Arduino is an education and hobby electronics brand. Espressif is a chipset vendor that made its reference design board so complete, cheap and flexible it became valuable as a product on its own. Other chipset vendors sell reference design boards for development, with the expectation that you will change it and produce it yourself to fit your needs. Espressif operate the same way, but if the dev board fit your needs, you don't need to produce squat; you just ship.
Espressif is a massive time saver in product design. Before the first cirquitboard has left the prototype factory, it i already proven to work with a bunch of hardware because you could strap up a bunch of dev boards with a cookie platter of interfaces and prototype from day one, bought from a hobby electronics shop with 1 day shipping.
Can you elaborate on that? I have never done anything with Arduino, and after reading this thread I have my doubts that I ever will. But I am curious to hear your thoughts about it, thanks!
Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.
Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.
Don't get me wrong, the fall of Arduino is a real loss. Espressif is a company in the business of making money, while Arduino's mission was to build a robust tinkerer ecosystem. Absent an acquisition, it's probably fair to say that Arduino would be less likely than Espressif, ST or TI to do bullshit like this.
This is just FUD you are spreading.
For more "serious" things, you have the ESP-IDF, which is a pretty good C-style interface to all sorts of hardware features. Less newbie friendly than the Arduino interface, but gives you more control. And it can be used in combination with the Arduino interface.
And then, as the cherry on top, you have their official Rust HAL for the ESP chips, implementing the standard Rust embedded-hal interfaces so it should "just work" with the growing Rust embedded ecosystem.
It's honestly impressive. The only thing that has kept Arduino competitive is their brand, good reputation, and focus on the education and tinkerer space. I frankly don't understand what value Qualcomm sees in Arduino if they're just gonna throw away that reputation and education friendliness.
https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-10-07-qualcomm-to-acqu...
Only a month...
It was nice while it lasted. RIP, Arduino.
Having to remembering everything I played with tweaking in a UI is a hilarious no-go.
However, in the intervening 15-20 years, people have been using arduino for increasingly complex applications and the basic IDE really sucks for that.
https://docs.platformio.org/en/latest/integration/ide/vscode...
And esp32 can use the same Arduino library.
I imagine that Adafruit, Sparkfun and some other companies are highly motivated.
Now this announcement where users get deprived of their copyright for anything they write by Qualcomm makes this fork more pressing.
$24 for a Teensy 4.0 over at Sparkfun. That seems reasonable to me.
I do miss the older Teensy 3's and 2's.
so does the image at the end of your post, guys, I'm an artist who's bought blinky stuff from Adafruit in the past and this makes me sad.
Adafruit has forked microcontroller libraries and toolchains before, and a huge chunk of their success has been directly due to Arduino and related things. So it will not surprise me if they are gearing up to announce their brand-spanking new Arduino-compatible devices, software, and ecosystem.
They could call it Adaduino.
My wife (cybernetics engineer) and I are buying a 3D printer and planned getting an Arduino as an entry point. What should we do instead? What are the best communities and resources?
I'm using ESP32 with platformio which has a dedicated community https://community.platformio.org/tag/espressif32
I've used devkit from M5stack, waveshare and adafruit.
(M5Stack has a full line of products for tinkering with many sensors & controllers)
You can also find many cheaper no-brand devkit anywhere but quality & docs can be unreliable.
* ESP32 - Good community support, bluetooth and wifi connectivity, some powerful variants as well for driving screens and other things.
* STM32 - Widely used, and an absolute boatload of chip variants for different tasks, from small little GPIO twiddling cores, to beefy chips running DSPs and outputting high-res images to displays.
* nRF52840 (and other variants) - Good for bluetooth devices, should be lower power than ESP32.
My recommendation would be to buy something like a Xiao RP2040:
https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-RP2040-v1-0-p-5026.html
They're cheap, have USB-C, and are super easy to use. Oh, and they have a reset button which for some reason, the official pico board does not. On top of that, the official pico board uses micro USB, so overall I would recommend NOT buying them, they're annoying to work with. The Xiao boards don't have a ton of IO pins, but they're at least good for learning and if you determine you need more IO you can move to a different dev board, or design your own PCB.
Rust on ESP32 is still a bit early - the HAL crate is still pretty unstable, but the toolchain is quite nice and I'm able to be productive enough that I never reach for C or C++.
ESP32 is quite popular (as seen by other suggestions) but I find the quality of Espressif, hardware/software/support, is widely varied.
FWIW PlatformIO works with Arduino and ESP32 (and will give you a better experience in so many ways)
The Arduino Cloud offering (runs on AWS) makes integrating your Arduino-based system into an end-to-end SaaS app simple (just watch and follow some tutorials on Youtube). There is also the Arduino PRO series of hardware for you if and when you want industrial-grade hardware for demanding systems/environments.
If the Qualcomm c-suites have half a brain amongst themselves they will not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
The framework is the only arguably valuable thing they offer, but even that's not enough to prop a business up on.
Most likely everything will continue exactly as-is: Arduino hardware will become increasingly dated and undesirable, and open source Arduino-compatible libraries will continue flourishing until nobody remembers that Arduino was a hardware platform before it was software framework.
I think we've long since passed the point where Wiring will ever go away, but I doubt we'll still be calling it Arduino for too much longer. Arduino is probably dead, and espressif is moving in.
New Arduino T&C: "user shall not [...] reverse-engineer the platform"
Obviously not discounting what a huge blow this is (and right when I was planning to explore Arduino more), but practically speaking, what can we do to help?
People who got Arduino, either:
- blinked some LEDs and forgotten about it
- switched to esp32 and/or stm32
- esp32 and esp8266 move is funny because people started buying esp8266 to add Wi-Fi to their arduinos and then realized that they can just throw away arduino all together.
- switched to cheap clones that offer more
- quick connect for that not only want to blink LEDs, but also have some cool graphs to look at (like temperature and humidity)
- boards that specifically designed for their use case (i.e. battery and eInk connectors and circuitry required)
Damn, like that's ever stopped the very people that like to reverse engineer things.
When Qualcomm got its hands on Arduino, the best case scenario was that Arduino influence would encourage Qualcomm to be more open to small developers, and the worst case scenario was that Qualcomm would devour Arduino and its degenerate lawyer culture would ruin all that's good about it.
This is an update towards the latter.
Would be very curious to learn what "Military weird things" means exactly..
See, open their SW in Ghidra or IDA and see for yourself, big pop-up and blank PE decompilation.
"By Qualcomm CEO buffoon, you cannot reverse engineer my software, muhahaha."
Qualcomm should sell this idea, VMProtect and others will go broke over night.
The only thing to watch out for are 3V3 vs 5V but then again if you’re doing anything worthwhile you’ve got a stash of buffers, op amps and MOSFETs.
What can I build with an Arduino that isn’t better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon? Almost nothing. When I’m staring at a screen 8 hours a day as a computer programmer already, my body screams for less screen time, not more. I’d rather learn Spanish or go skiing than start a FOSS project; and I don’t think I’m alone.
I understand there’s an artistic expression aspect to it… but I think at this point I’d rather learn photography or painting, actual art, for expression. Something normal people understand and appreciate. It’s too much of the same for me.
YMMV, but if you aren't loving the hobby element anymore and the itch can be scratched by reaching for a product, that's a shift in what you are enjoying, not an indictment of hobbies :)
For an end user maybe not much, but for tinkerers, a lot. Almost everything where you need/want customization, unique features, and so on. This said, you don't strictly need an Arduino for that, I actually (almost) never use them because their software library is so high level that it eats so much resources on the underlying microcontrollers and make things more complex when you want to do more advanced stuff (like handling interrupts). When I use them, is for some quick&dirty thing (e.g. I need to turn on a stripe of "smart" LEDs quickly), but never include them in finished things.
Less time, more money, changing hobbies, etc...
It is almost always better from a practical perspective to buy the complete product over DIY, or even better, not buy at all. Those who claim otherwise are justifying their hobby. Best case scenario, you break even after not counting your time, which is actually great, because most people pay for their hobbies.
The hobbyist movement didn't change, you did, life is like that and that's not a bad thing. The technologies change but the general idea stay the same. For Arduino (the brand), I think it is dying, but that just because you can buy generic ESP32 boards on AliExpress for cheaper and with more variety.
For example, I build automated microscopes as a hobby and I use arduino products (well, used- now I use ESP32 with micropython, but that still depends on the Arduino API) and it's been tremendous for building high speed interfaces (I need to blink an LED at the same rate/in sync with a camera shutter opening/closing) . Even when I do photography, I'm still building arduino and other related things to help automate the tedious bits. And when that gets boring, I take out my guitar and use arduino or similar products to do audio processing in realtime.
For many of the things I want to do, there is no product on Amazon, or it's obscenely expensive (XY stages typically cost $10K and up).
It's the act of playing, where the music itself is an important part, but just a part, that I enjoy.
A quick check of just one of your examples shows the term "3d printer" is googled for literally twice as frequently today as it was in 2016, for instance.
Arduino is (was?) one of those skills. Practice them enough, and you'll soon find the things you want aren't available for sale, at any price.
I mean, my little hobby project is making the LED strips taped to my skis respond to an accelerometer, so they pulse brighter when I make a good turn. Plus Bluetooth control of the patterns. Not gonna find that on Amazon.
To your reply-writer, how do you think those products came to be, many of them are productization of hobbiest projects.
The arduino project jumpstarted a whole ecosystem, but I don't that ecosystem needs arduino anymore.
Sure. I'm responding to this bit:
> better, cheaper, faster, and more complete as a full product on Amazon
Mine's on a nRF52840 board. My point is less about Arduino and more about tinkering.
Isn't there a term for that: wage slavery[1]?
The news describe an important shift, but just describe that it is, no need for "youtubefication" of titles here.
Stuff like https://www.adafruit.com/product/4062
The last time I used Arduino, I ended up just coding the bare metal out of necessity for the things I was trying to do. Some functionality of the chips was literally not accessible unless you break out of the sandbox. But then I wondered why we didn't just get people set up without shielding them so much from what it actually takes to do embedded development. Ultimately, the failure of the Maker Movement to me is that there is not an upgrade path. You start blinking LEDs and then what? Thus, lots of people end up being eternal beginners, which I don't think is helpful.
To some extent I agree that the upgrade path is lacking. I recently helped a friend move out of the ino file model into building regular c++ applications because his design was getting pretty complicated. Once he realized that he knew more of c++ than he thought he did, it was a game changer for him.
At the same time, people have done some pretty amazing stuff using the Arduino platform without knowing how to use the things you mention. What you call eternal beginners have accomplished a lot. James Bruton does some pretty impressive robotics work using Arduino.
You began an inappropriate chain of comments by being uncharitable in your initial interpretation of my sentiment. People piled on emotionally as a direct result of your opening sentence even though your second one confirms what I said.
Intense gatekeeping in the electronics community is precisely why communities such as Arduino could flourish in the first place (and their creators could benefit financially). Ultimately, people just want to get stuff done and Arduino is a way of doing it. If you go to Stack Exchange, someone will tell you to buy a college textbook and come back in six months once you understand Laplace transforms. An artist working on an installation doesn't need that. A person building an automated cat feeder doesn't need that. In fact, almost no one does, it's just something we torture EE students with.
I think a lot of the negativity toward Arduino boils down to saying "nooo, it's supposed to be hard!". But if you want the Arduino crowd to get more interested in your field of expertise, you need to build them a ramp, not to tell them they're not real electrical engineers.
You also talk about gatekeeping when in the many makerspaces I have been to, there are always highly experienced people who tinker on their own terms but rarely pay it forward, meaning they keep their knowledge. The reason for this is due to the often anarchist structure of maker spaces. Things happen if they do.
Sometimes there is an organized class. Most of the times, not. So you come in every week and people are just sitting around talking about the rules of keeping the space clean and when dues are due.
The concept of the hacker space and maker space is great. The execution leaves a lot to be desired. I consider it a 1.0 of a technical movement.
The "blinky LED" roadblock is really just a result of the fact that more complex "maker" projects require some amount of electrical or engineering or fabrication knowledge and skill, which takes some trial and error and practice -- the same thing that limits progress in lots of other hobbies.
The real "Maker" movement is the demand that drives so many consumer level fabrication tools and components that were only available as expensive industrial and commercial orders in the past -- 3d printers, laser cutters, microcontrollers, IC sensors, brushless motors -- there are so many options now that just weren't available at all 20 years ago.
Yet, when the intent is that the population is to be empowered democratically to wield these tools, there needs to be a better pedagogical culture in the communities.
I cannot believe the amount of people replying who seem to think that having a path to improvement is gatekeeping. How are people supposed to actually use these tools to make greater than novelty-level changes in their lives and communities?
The price of Arduino has not only been going up and up, but there have been IP disputes over the years. At the same time, you can get chips for pennies on the dollar. People in this thread are lamenting the possible demise of Arduino, when like Cloudflare, like Github, and like so many other things, they should have never been so invested into a single player.
The result of Arduino going away should be "Ah, it is a sad day that one of our many choices of accessible boards is going away. let's make sure the other ones are robust against that same fate and keep creating with our remaining tools."
Instead, the conversation is "How dare that big corp change the terms and conditions on our only hobby option!"
I certainly see a structural and cultural problem here.
What happens as a result of this is that someone spends a lot of time tinkering and then they think they know what they are doing. With that confidence, they might apply for a job or take on a more dangerous project. The job will say they don't actually have the skill, even though they have been putting in the time. And the overconfidence could lead to trying to do more dangerous things than they should on projects.
A tinkering culture is fine, but it needs to have safety and skill progression as its foundation. Most Maker Spaces I have been to have done a good job trying to keep things safe, but ultimately, people are people.
That also seems to have very little to due with the safety concerns you express in your last two paragraphs.
If you are having understanding this distinction, then that is the exact point I am making about the Maker Movement. It is accepted that people progress if they do, and if they don't, then tough. There is a balance between perpetual tinkering, some sort of progression culture, and a full on degree.
Think about how many thousands have purchased a musical instrument only to abandon the hobby after a few months. Is that a failure of music-as-a-hobby or just humans being humans?
Most people I know who get into electronics as a hobby aren’t looking at it as a potential career. Myself included! This is the most absurd take I’ve seen all day.
As for "progression", I suppose you're disappointed that very few bicycle owners become professional cyclists.
This also goes beyond programming on a microcontroller as the Maker Movement is about more than just electronics.
But there are a lot of real world problems that can be solved with a form and a few buttons, and you look like a magician for normal people.
I still have one project in production, but the compiler is getting harder and harder to install.
Anyway, there is room for beginers tools, in spite they may have a tall second step.
---
Is there a good tutorial for upgrading from Arduino to a proffesional microcontroler? (Or you can write one.)
Unfortunately, it suffers from having a very generic name. It is short enough while going over concepts to take a person just beyond Arduino-land.
Who says a tinkering culture needs to have skill progression? Maybe people just like to tinker. Maybe simple things are still useful.
Let people do things. Let people enjoy things.
Did you help establish it?