I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.
Your comment is/was getting downvoted perhaps because of the last line but this is very true:
> It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
Arduino is owned by Qualcomm, Qualcomm is known for being litigious. Whoever wrote that note, unless it was the CEO of Qualcomm, doesn't actually call the shots and if tomorrow the directive comes from above to sue makers they will have to comply.
This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:
> 1.1 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”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by 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”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion)
That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.
Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...
Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.
The article is AI-written. Obviously can't be relied on to accurately convey the original information
"But Arduino isn’t SaaS. It’s the foundation of the maker ecosystem." is a giveaway, but the whole set of paragraphs of setup before that is chatgpt's style
Yeah no. Wishful thinking. History has shown that huge corporations taking over open source project generally results in a big change how those projects are governed and how the legalese like t&c turns out.
Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.
> The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied.
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
Arduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time.
This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
Do tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.
Not sure if this really counts as tinkering, but the other day I needed a custom HID device for my PC. I ordered an Arduino Micro (I think?), one that supports HID out of the box, and with under 300 lines of code my problem was solved.
The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.
I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.
I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)
I do. Mostly because I literally have dozens of them lying around ready to be reused for whatever my latest idea is. Admittedly the bulk of those are clones, not "official" Arduino products.
Other reasons I'll reach for an Arduino over alternatives like ESP, RasPi (Linux or 2040/2350) include:
Simplicity. I very much ascribe to KISS. Having WiFi or Linux as part of my hardware _always_ leads me into scope creep. If the idea could be done on an AT328 (or similar), in my head it _needs_ to be.
Robustness. I probably have thrown out dozens of 3.3V microcontrollers/SOCs with dead io pins because I fucked up. An Arduino will often shrug off shorting 12V to an io pin (or even vcc) without blinking. RasPis seem to sometimes get damaged just because you looked sideways at them while thinking about 12V.
Experience. For me, the way I come up with project ideas seems to often be fundamentally linked with "knowing" how I'll do it on an Arduino. I've been using them over 20 years now, practically since they first appeared. And I'd been writing code for ATMega chips since a Burningman project in 1999, struggling with a cross compiling gcc toolchain. Arduino IDE was both instantly familiar, and such a breath of fresh air for me back then. It allowed me to easily experiment, and lowered my barrier of entry to random weekend or evening project ideas.
Separateness from work. I find the low level coding on a bare 8 bit microcontroller to be almost a completely different thing to coding for work. When work is going badly and I'm approaching burnout, any personal time Linux based coding for RasPis pretty much grinds to a halt. I'll find myself reading a book or doomscrolling social media instead of tinkering with that kind of project. The Arduino IDE is different enough to "work tools" that it doesnt get affected quite as
With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.
The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993
Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"
There's plenty of semi-technical tinkerers out there, doing things like building flight sim cockpits, scraping by on copying ready made code, doing minimal changes and asking forums or LLMs if they get stuck.
They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used.
They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.
Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.
I just made the discovery the other day that there are two Arduino IDEs, the old crusty one maintained by Arduino.org and the new hotness maintained by Arduino.cc.
I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome.
Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.
I'm sure somebody like me would happily take them off your hands. The AVR is still a solid platform for low-level applications. A lot of the Arduino libraries never really took full advantage of what you could do with that chip. Whatever happens with the Arduino IDE, those boards will still be useful tools for quite a while.
I don't know if I'll use Arduino in a professional project, but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.
Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.
It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.
> but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.
Would you mind elaborating more? I don't quite understand what you mean.
Everyone in my circles has moved to PlatformIO and mostly uses ESP32 boards, but almost exclusively through the Android framework/HAL and its various libraries.
I actually use Teensy. I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down. It's not bare-bones enough for many of my projects.
From Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful. That hero-loop programming is not what anyone should ever do. And experienced developers can get better results from something like FreeRTOS (or if you're a masochist Zephyr). And ESP32s are cheaper, as are RP2040s. ...
But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.
For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.
> From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful.
Specific AVR Arduino annoyances I remember:
* Strings loaded to RAM instead of program memory, so you use up all your RAM if you have a lot of text. Easily fixed with a macro
* serial.println blocks, so your whole program has to stop and wait for the string to be transmitted. Easily fixed with a buffer and ISR
* Floating-point used everywhere, because fuck you
* No printf(). It's in avr-libc, and it's easy plumbed in, but the first C/C++ function that everybody ever learned to use was somehow too complicated or something.
* A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.
I think they ultimately did a disservice to novice programmers by giving them something that was almost a standard C++ environment, but just not quite.
I think it's important to understand the early development.
It's true that you can (and always could) use avr-gcc and libc, but the core sale was what makes it not this.
The "locked in"/captured API and IDE were directly extensions of a language and IDE called Processing.
Processing overlaid an art-focussed layer on top of Java, providing a simpler API, and an IDE with just two buttons.
Arduino was based on this - the same IDE format, similar API conventions (just on top of C++), precisely to allow these same artists to move into physical installations and art.
Arduino was not designed initially to be so general, it was tool written by and for this specific group of people, so has opinions and handrails that limit the space to provide the same affordances as Processing specifically.
There is no lock in, you can use avr-gcc with Arduino boards. Arduino is a portable SDK with HAL, you can add support for your own devices to it pretty easily
The lock-in is that it's a big pain in the arse to use anything but their IDE.
Most vendor lock-in isn't "it's impossible to do the thing" but "it's hard enough to do the thing any other way, so this is effectively the only practical way to do it"
What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
For some reason most companies never seem to realize that they will destroy their acquisitions. It's always kind of an afterthought. "Oh, right, we have to terrify the new customers and lay off the people who make the products work. Sam, take care of that, will you?"
Acquisitions tend to be done in a haze of dream-state thinking. Maybe that's part of it.
You're buying an established brand to augment yours, regardless of what that brand does. It's a sort of SEO.
In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net
Readit News
https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.
> It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.
Arduino is owned by Qualcomm, Qualcomm is known for being litigious. Whoever wrote that note, unless it was the CEO of Qualcomm, doesn't actually call the shots and if tomorrow the directive comes from above to sue makers they will have to comply.
> 1.1 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”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by 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”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.
That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.
Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...
Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.
"But Arduino isn’t SaaS. It’s the foundation of the maker ecosystem." is a giveaway, but the whole set of paragraphs of setup before that is chatgpt's style
Deleted Comment
Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.
> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.
Yep, the complete opposite of "open".
This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.
https://arduinohistory.github.io
https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...
The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.
I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.
I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)
Deleted Comment
Other reasons I'll reach for an Arduino over alternatives like ESP, RasPi (Linux or 2040/2350) include:
Simplicity. I very much ascribe to KISS. Having WiFi or Linux as part of my hardware _always_ leads me into scope creep. If the idea could be done on an AT328 (or similar), in my head it _needs_ to be.
Robustness. I probably have thrown out dozens of 3.3V microcontrollers/SOCs with dead io pins because I fucked up. An Arduino will often shrug off shorting 12V to an io pin (or even vcc) without blinking. RasPis seem to sometimes get damaged just because you looked sideways at them while thinking about 12V.
Experience. For me, the way I come up with project ideas seems to often be fundamentally linked with "knowing" how I'll do it on an Arduino. I've been using them over 20 years now, practically since they first appeared. And I'd been writing code for ATMega chips since a Burningman project in 1999, struggling with a cross compiling gcc toolchain. Arduino IDE was both instantly familiar, and such a breath of fresh air for me back then. It allowed me to easily experiment, and lowered my barrier of entry to random weekend or evening project ideas.
Separateness from work. I find the low level coding on a bare 8 bit microcontroller to be almost a completely different thing to coding for work. When work is going badly and I'm approaching burnout, any personal time Linux based coding for RasPis pretty much grinds to a halt. I'll find myself reading a book or doomscrolling social media instead of tinkering with that kind of project. The Arduino IDE is different enough to "work tools" that it doesnt get affected quite as
I have dozens of Arduinos that I will never use.
With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.
The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993
Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"
They just want something that works, and ideally to keep using the same thing they've always used. They know what Arduino is, as long as it does the job they aren't interested in researching alternatives. They don't want to get involved in adapting someone's instructions for a different pin layout, or risk that anything they've done up to now stops working.
Yes, we all know it's a massively out of date platform easily outclassed by much cheaper and more flexible solutions, and if you must use the Arduino IDE it can build code for all sorts of boards. But for non-technical people by far the most important factor is to stick with something safe and known.
I'd been using the Arduino.org version which had mostly driven me to use PlatformIO and ESPHome.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#ide
Unfortunately, but perhaps fortuitously, I needed to use a Library only compatible with Arduino 3.0.0 which is incompatible with PlatformIO. That lead me to discover the Arduino.cc IDE which, while not on par with VSCode, is dramatically better than the Arduino.org IDE.
Why do you speak for everyone? I use my 2009 Arduino when I need something quick and simple.
Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.
It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.
Would you mind elaborating more? I don't quite understand what you mean.
I semi-attribute this to my lack of willpower but perhaps arduino also isn't as tinker-epic as I thought it may be.
But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.
For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.
Specific AVR Arduino annoyances I remember:
* Strings loaded to RAM instead of program memory, so you use up all your RAM if you have a lot of text. Easily fixed with a macro
* serial.println blocks, so your whole program has to stop and wait for the string to be transmitted. Easily fixed with a buffer and ISR
* Floating-point used everywhere, because fuck you
* No printf(). It's in avr-libc, and it's easy plumbed in, but the first C/C++ function that everybody ever learned to use was somehow too complicated or something.
* A hacked-together preprocessor that concatenated everything, which meant you could only have your includes in one place, thus breaking perfectly good, portable code.
I think they ultimately did a disservice to novice programmers by giving them something that was almost a standard C++ environment, but just not quite.
It's true that you can (and always could) use avr-gcc and libc, but the core sale was what makes it not this.
The "locked in"/captured API and IDE were directly extensions of a language and IDE called Processing.
Processing overlaid an art-focussed layer on top of Java, providing a simpler API, and an IDE with just two buttons.
Arduino was based on this - the same IDE format, similar API conventions (just on top of C++), precisely to allow these same artists to move into physical installations and art.
Arduino was not designed initially to be so general, it was tool written by and for this specific group of people, so has opinions and handrails that limit the space to provide the same affordances as Processing specifically.
Most vendor lock-in isn't "it's impossible to do the thing" but "it's hard enough to do the thing any other way, so this is effectively the only practical way to do it"
Acquisitions tend to be done in a haze of dream-state thinking. Maybe that's part of it.
In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net