8 ms·
Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight
- PaulHoule 10mo agoSorry, you got bought by Qualcomm and that was suicide.
- 12_throw_away 10mo ago"We are Arduino. We are open. We’re not going anywhere." -- statement from Qualcomm without a single human being's name on it
- anonymousiam 10mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_Is_Futile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_Is_Futile
- RobotToaster 10mo ago> We are open. Except that half their boards and the entire cloud platform aren't open source at all.
- shevy-java 10mo agoYeah. This can also be the intro: "and so it begins". E. g. qualcom stepwise swallowing the infrastructure and pulling the chair under the hobbyists community.
- camkego 10mo agoIf you walk into the head office of Qualcomm (in Sorrento Vally, San Diego, CA) and you see the the "Patent Wall" in the entrance covered with almost 1400 patents, it's kind of hard to wonder just how open Arduino will be.
- butvacuum 10mo agoWow that's tacky.
- shevy-java 10mo agoYou are right - the whole blog entry has zero names mentioned. An anonymous opinion piece indeed. Could have almost been written by AI, but the content seemed so angry that I think it must have been a corporate spokesperson who just woke up, read people being concerned and angrily hacked away at the keys at the keyboard.
- riazrizvi 10mo agoThis allays my suspicions. I appreciate the response to this community’s concerns.
- shevy-java 10mo agoBut ... how?
- ykonstant 10mo agoIt does?!
- fn-mote 10mo agoIf you put the /s more people would understand.
- kvakvs 10mo agoI don't get it, do we keep the pitchforks out, or do we stash the pitchforks?
- beefnugs 10mo ago"we collect data for your privacy" they have no idea what words or actions mean anymore. There is no such thing as being purchased by a large company while retaining anything non-evil. If anything this is the remaining employees who were lied to their face about remaining whatever they were
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 10mo agoIt may be over already. I mean, the pitchforks will change what exactly? Looks like qualcom pwns I mean owns the arduino ecosystem now. Just like a killed-by-Google meme, qualcom may soon start its own killed-by-qualcom trend.
- bsder 10mo agoYou can keep the pitchforks out, but you sadly need to assume Arduino is dead. Of course, if you weren't already making that assumption when Qualcomm bought them, I don't know what to tell you ...
- ACCount37 10mo agoKeep sharpening the pitchforks. The license change isn't a dealbreaker, but Qualcomm still consists of 900000 insectoid lawyers pretending to be humans, and their hivemind thinks "open source" is some kind of disease. The "best case scenario" was that Arduino would get Qualcomm as a whole to be more open to small devs. The "worst case scenario" was that Qualcomm would get Arduino to be as bad as Qualcomm, and you'd have to "talk to sales" to get an SDK for your development board. So far, we're not getting the "best case scenario". So keep the pitchforks at hand.
- SV_BubbleTime 10mo agoYou can stash them. Show me a time anyone has ever remained themselves after being purchased by Qualcomm. It’s over for Arduino.
- typpilol 10mo agoIf the only restriction on reverse engineering is their cloud SaaS, why was everyone up in arms? Or is this Arduino trying to save face?
- healsdata 10mo agoTheir definition of "the platform" in the TOS is verbose and has weird grammar. I can see how people came away with a different understanding. > 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; > 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”).
- unmole 10mo ago> why was everyone up in arms? Engagement farming, clout chasing etc.
- Karliss 10mo agoLarge companies have repeatedly demonstrated that they will pick whichever interpretation is most convenient at the time. When there are pitchforks they will claim that you are confused and misinterpreted the writing but when you get poisoned by food in their restaurant and try to sue them they will point at terms of service on their online video streaming service that your spouse agreed 5 years ago as if that's relevant (not a joke Disney tried that one). These things are supposed to be written by proffesionals, I dont think Hanlon's razor sufficiently explains it, terms of service are at least partially intentionally written as vague and unclear as possible for benefit of one side.
- arjie 10mo agoSeems reasonable. I have a Duemilanove and an Uno R2 that I haven't used in ages but Arduino stuff has always been open as far as I remember. I really can't bring myself to pull out the pitchforks here. They've earned the trust from me. It's been over a decade now.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 10mo agoDid you miss the bit where they got bought by Qualcomm??
- shevy-java 10mo agoDoes not really make a whole lot of sense to me. You are basically saying that "past experience means future trust". How does this relate? I mean, a company xyz can have been doing great in the past, but may go extinct lateron for any reason. See Sun and then who owns Java nowadays. I much preferred Sun over Oracle really.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo agoI feel the parent. I assume what they refer to is good will accumulated over the years. But that by itself does not last forever and eventually disappears ( faster in some than others ). I personally learned to not get too comfy. Stuff changes, which means we have need to adjust as well. It is just hard sometimes.
- neilv 10mo agoThey say "privacy" a lot on that blog page, but that very page runs surveillance capitalism trackers from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others.
- healsdata 10mo agoAdafruit acted a bit shady here. Their original post includes: "Military weird things" Reading the ToS, the two mentions of military are "don't use our AI product for military use" and in the export and trade controls section. How are either of those weird?
- rockskon 10mo agoGiven the ambiguity of the phrase "military use" when the military does, in-fact, use it for things the military does - I am not confident in the slightest with Arduino's use of language here.
- healsdata 10mo agoHow would you want to see this further clarified? > Military Use: Use by or for any military organization or for any military purpose, including but not limited to projects sponsored or paid for by military organizations, or use by the U.S. Department of Defense (except for DARPA), U.S. Armed Forces, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. intelligence agencies, or any foreign counterparts of the foregoing.
- rockskon 10mo agoGee, I dunno, how about by not limiting its scope exclusively to AI usage by the military? Also - given how many tech companies involved in AI have done an about-face on military usage of it, I'm increasingly seeing it as an empty promise.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- shevy-java 10mo agoIndeed. Also because any big organisation or corporation can both do evil and good. Often research projects with guarantees to release knowledge or some other improvements such as to software projects under a permissive licence.
- 10mo ago
- villgax 10mo agoFaceless corpo speak at best
- exasperaited 10mo ago“ we have been open-source long before it was fashionable.” That is a weird, weird claim for a firm that was founded off the back of a project that started in 2005. It’s, what, over five years after the VA Linux IPO, two years after Microsoft arguably used Caldera as a weapon in a proxy war against IBM, seven years after one of the most famous software products of all time, Netscape Navigator, went open source. Just a strange, facially implausible bit of appeal to tradition.
- speedgoose 10mo ago> The Qualcomm acquisition doesn’t modify how user data is handled or how we apply our open-source principles. That’s a lie. Perhaps they lie to themselves. I don’t know. I can only guess.
- cornonthecobra 10mo ago"we have been open-source long before it was fashionable" An abridged timeline: 1960s to 1980s: hobbyist and academic/research computing create thriving public domain software ecosystems (literally the birth of FOSS) 1983: The GNU Project begins 1989: The World Wide Web is created 1991: Linus Torvalds posts the first Linux kernel to USENET 1992: 386BSD is released; Slackware is created 1993: NetBSD is forked; Debian is created 1994: FreeBSD 2 is released 1995: Red Hat is created [a decade of FOSS and the internet changing computing and research forever] 2005: A collection of low-cost microcontroller education tools, benefiting from half a century of FOSS, is formalized into something called "Arduino"
- shevy-java 10mo ago> 1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web I think ideas etc... existed before that, e. g. DARPA and what Alan Kay said. Tim mostly pushed forward a simple protocol that worked. Would be interesting to see how much Tim really generated de-novo, but in general I disagree that he "invented" the world wide web as such. That would seem unfair to many other people - just like Alan Kay once said, you see further by standing on the shoulders of giants (translation: you benefitted from earlier inventions and ideas, made by other people).
- cornonthecobra 10mo agoAs I was writing it out, I knew someone was going to complain. It's an abridged timeline. Brevity because the point is the date, not the fine detail. But since I don't care to argue on the internet... edited.
- scuff3d 10mo agoThere's always someone who has to be pedantic
- exasperaited 10mo ago> Would be interesting to see how much Tim really generated de-novo, but in general I disagree that he "invented" the world wide web as such. Eh? What do you mean it would be interesting to see? It's well-documented. Not controversial or hidden. The HTTP protocol yes. But also the browser/editor app, WorldWideWeb, a web server for it, and the URL scheme, are literal Berners-Lee inventions. HTML may be an SGML language but it's his SGML language. He's not claiming and nobody is claiming he invented hypertext (he would say Ted Nelson and Alan Kay). He absolutely invented the fundamentals of the end-to-end web technology as we use it. There was no functioning internet open-hypermedia system before 1990. It's just not in question and it's kind of disingenuous to imply he didn't do much. (Defining down "invent" in this way is also disingenuous to all inventors, who all do their work in the context of prior art)
- latexr 10mo agoThis is so full of vapid corporate speak, it’s ripe for one of those joke “translation” posts: > We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates. Translation: Y’all are angry about us changing what we stood for. > We are thankful our community cares enough to engage with us and we believe transparency and open dialogue are foundational to Arduino. Translation: You fuckers are loud and this is blowing up in our faces, so we need to do damage control fast or the acquisition will be worthless.
- shevy-java 10mo ago"Let us be absolutely clear: we have been open-source long before it was fashionable" This is a VERY bad attempt at self-promo, sorry. Many other open source projects are much older, so "fashionable" is a very emotionally laden word. But, even aside from this: what matters is the now and future. You can not refer to a "glorious past" if the future just looks bleak and bad. "The Qualcomm acquisition doesn’t modify how user data is handled or how we apply our open-source principles." Everyone already sees that the Qualcomm take-over changed the project. There is no way to deny it. Now, perhaps it COULD lead to an improvement - who knows. But it can also lead to a stagnation or decline. We saw that with many other projects that suddenly became progressively starved down. Even without a corporate overlord that may happen, when users, hobbyists, devs, are no longer as interested. They may write fewer blog entries and so forth - decline happens. "We periodically update our legal documents to reflect new features, evolving regulations, and best practices." As does Mozilla - yet firefox keeps on dying and dwindling. Sorry, but this just reads like a post mortem to me. "Restrictions on reverse-engineering apply specifically to our Software-as-a-Service cloud applications" Which open source licence typically were to include that? And, by the way - I am increasingly noticing how the "legal terms" try to provide provisions that aren't part of a licence. I noticed this some time ago with regard to RubyCentral slapping down meta-corporate rules on rubygems.org (see here https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/07/08/policies-live.html https://blog.rubygems.org/2025/07/08/policies-live.html). So this is what corporations want to do. I don't see how this benefits the hobbyists or solo devs in any way, shape or form. And I don't agree that this "sets the record straight" either. To me it reads like a corporate take-over of arduino. That's bad.
- NalNezumi 10mo agoAnyone have any advice for Arduino replacement? I recently (unknowingly) bought a R4 for some LED projects but knowing now the background, I'm wondering if there's any other alternative for hobby (noob level) micro controller project
- petre 10mo agoAny ESP32, RP2040 or RP2350 board. The last two use external QSPI flash, so hobby projects only. There are no fuses to set to read protect the firmware.
- Neywiny 10mo agoJust to be clear, some micros (STM32s come to mind) have what they call "on the fly decryption" for external flash. Basically, if the micros wanted to, they would. I think ESP32s are also using qspi flashes but they're integrated in package? Maybe that's changed but that's how I vaguely remember it
- petre 10mo agoI believe only the ESP32 modules with 16M have QSPI flash, the 4M standard flash is on chip. For on the fly decryption you need on chip enclaves to store the keys. Anyway, it doesn't really matter for hobby projects and the ESP32 can also be used for commercial projects.
- geerlingguy 10mo agoIndeed, the number of "non commercial" projects using these chips that are set up much less securely than even modest "hobbyist" projects boggles the mind.
- 34679 10mo agoI use a RP2040 in a commercial product, but it's for a niche portion of a niche industry and it's not intended to ever communicate with another device. Disabling USB mass storage and not adding a bootloader button is good enough for me.
- 1718627440 10mo agoWhat I don't get is how what they do is even legally possible, since the libraries have all F/OSS licenses (MIT, LGPL, GPL, APL), and they don't even own the sole copyright to most things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45985663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45985663
- sc68cal 10mo agoYou'd have to sue them to enforce it. Good luck bringing a case against Qualcomm, perhaps one of the worst companies known for its intellectual property management
- 1718627440 10mo agoWhy do I need to sue them, when it's me, who does things I think are granted in their licenses, that they try to forbid? Isn't that the other way around?
- zoobab 10mo agoNo money for software patent bullies like Qualcomm. The need of an Arduino fork.