This has been a fascinating story. As someone who has been an arduino user/fan for years I knew very little of what was going on till Hackaday started covering it.
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."
How was this allowed to happen? It's like Dell renaming itself to "Microsoft SRL" and then selling "Windows 9000" to beat MS on the version number train.
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)?
When Arduino got popular, the original team of five spun off a manufacturing company, Smart Projects, to handle the manufacturing and distribution tedium, with 4 of the 5 partners staying in the Development arm.
When push came to shove and the development side wanted to make the manufacturing non-exclusive, Smart Projects beat them to the legal punch and registered the trademark before the development team did, forked and uprevved what they could, and cut off the income from sales going back to the dev team.
Seems to be a lot of "piggy-backers" piling onto the Github page without understanding the history...
> 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.
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.
I wouldn't exactly call a founder-spin-off a "bunch of wannabe fakers" and a "phony organization" and a "phony fork".
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).
I wouldn't exactly call a duplicitous and wilful act of attempting to subvert a trade name and associated business from those who approached and enriched said subverting party in good faith a "founder-spin-off."
People would rather blame someone else for something they rationalize the someone else has done than blame themselves for the things they just did. We're broken in that regard, and it's time to fix it.
It's like "Windows" was trademarked in Italy several years ago in a way that became known only when "Microsoft" went to trademark "Windows" in the US. Now "Dell" can sell "Windows" in Italy and "Microsoft" can sell it in the US.
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.
"It's like Dell renaming itself to "Microsoft SRL" and then selling "Windows 9000" to beat MS on the version number train."
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.
In Italy are there no laws about infringing another companies trademark property? Here in the US, If I started a company called Pepsi, LLC I'd get sued within minutes of filing my business license.
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:
The story as described by the GP is shortened for clarity, but apparently there was no bad blood between the teams when "Arduino Srl" was registered and it was believed one individual held that italian trademark on behalf of the team on good faith. It was only much later that Arduino Srl started the whole imitation game
This is only meta, but something needs to be done to prevent Github threads from getting flooded by useless replies as soon as they gain some popularity. And there is far worse than this one - some will have you scrolling through an avalanche of meme gifs.
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.
I've advocated pretty hard for this feature and it turns out this used to be a thing but was removed way back in the day (years now). There is somewhat of a movement surrounding this feature, and Github wants to hear more support from the community before moving forward bringing it back. If you support this feature request, please send an email to support@github.com expressing your support for it. For me, I hate that projects will lock-to-contributors a popular issue they don't want to implement because of the +1 comment spam. I can think of two very huge projects that did this in the last couple of months. Github definitely needs a thumbs up / upvote mechanic.
That would disallow you from voicing that opinion so succinctly.
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.
I'm not sure about that. If you take a look at (for example) the awful change on Stack Overflow made by Shog9 to mitigate short comments (and what he believes are therefore bad comments), you'll see the huge backlash and also notice how many people can and do leave thoughtful comments with only a single line or less. I think it is an impossible problem to judge the quality of content by its quantity. The +1 comment is an extremely niche type of comment "problem" that can be mitigated successfully by outsourcing the functionality to a simple upvote widget, but I think that's as far as you can get in judging comment quality without making very broad statements that quash some quality content by mistake.
Honestly, Shog9 is the single biggest reason why my participation in Stack Exchange has dwindled to prettymuch nothing. It's as if he wakes up one morning and decides "I know! I'll make a huge change to Stack Overflow that will piss thousands of users off! ^-^"
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.
It's possible to "lock" [0] conversations on GitHub. This means that only
collaborators of the repository are able to add comments to the issue/pull
request.
> 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).
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.
I think the point is to apply social pressure. I agree that it can be obnoxious, but I would argue that is part of the social contract one makes with public repositories. It can also be managed on the recipient's side as well (email settings & filters).
Or open-source teams can promote the use of ZenHub [1] and adopt the +1 feature just like thousands of non-open source devs have done within their own companies every day.
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!
You people are everywhere pushing ZenHub for this +1 stuff. The vast majority of people who want a +1 feature want it on Github natively and not on some third-party for-profit browser extension.
> This is only meta, but something needs to be done to prevent Github threads from getting flooded by useless replies as soon as they gain some popularity.
When I started tinkering with microcontroller, I looked at a lot of the projects like Arduino. In the end, I decided to just get some PIC chips and a breadboard and learn it from the ground up. One of the reasons that I did so was because I thought long and hard about what happens if one of these open source hardware projects get's into the same issues as many software projects get into.
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.
Nice. If you (and anyone else reading) still have any project schematics or notes you can share, it'd be an awesome reminder of and complement to the spirit behind these hardware projects.
> Doesn't each one send an email to the project owner and everyone who's commented on the issue?
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.
You can opt-out of notifications from a particular issue with the "Unsubscribe" button. Based on the timestamps, it can also be observed that only a couple of posts have been added since this submission. (There was about 20 before submission).
arduino/arduino is the legit software from the majority of the arduino team.
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.
Most open-source licenses have a clause to prevent forks with the same name. It is in fact against GPL and Apache license to fork project under its original name.
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.
Forking these days is mainly friendly because of the ecosystem that Git has fostered, but until relatively recently, forking was generally hostile, to force development to move in a certain direction away from the original intent.
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.
Technically, that was one of the more hostile forks; EGCS developers were very unhappy that gcc wasn't moving fast enough and in the direction they wanted. They put their code where their mouths were. The only significant, more-hostile fork that I know of is Emacs/XEmacs.
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.
That's what I'd heard at first, but I remember being corrected and told that it was much friendlier than the public assumed, and it was basically treated as gcc's unstable branch.
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.
All the competing Unix forks? The infighting in the Unix world and the blatant attempts to break compatibility with each other pretty much killed Unix, about the only thing keeping it limping along any more is all the effort that's been put into OpenBSD and FreeBSD, and the commercial backing for Solaris.
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.
A hostile fork is when a project is forked by people with the aim to supplant the original project without the involvement (of the majority/leader) of the original team.
I think the IO.JS vs. Node.JS thing could be named a hostile fork, as could the MySQL vs. MariaDB situation.
This is pretty close - now imagine if both OOo and LO both had legitimate claims to the OOo trademark, and both tried to use them - leaving both versions named OOo with merely competing versioning.
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.)
Even if you forked on GitHub, you can ask the staff to "detach" or "extract" your fork from the existing network. Detaching only un-forks your repo, whereas extracting makes your fork the new root and preserves any sub-forks thereof. They will happily do it upon request.
Ooh, thanks for posting this. I have a project that I forked so I could use the base code from it, but it really doesn't make sense as a fork and confuses people. (It's a deployment plugin, and my fork just installs a different piece of software than the original)
Could you explain the reasoning why? I'm not offended, but with the new title there's very little context without having to follow through the link/read the comments.
The HN guidelines call for using the original title unless it is linkbait or misleading. HN doesn't allow submitters to editorialize (put their own spin on) the stories they submit. The only way to avoid this, since we're not experts on all content, is to use language from the story itself that neutrally represents it.
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.
I found the renaming a bit hard to understand as well.
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.
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