
Arduino-Org: “Rename this fork and use less confusing versioning” - abstractbeliefs
https://github.com/arduino-org/Arduino/issues/2
======
hoopism
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."

Read more at HAD ([http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-
ii/](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](https://vimeo.com/18539129)

~~~
ihsw
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)?

~~~
abstractbeliefs
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.

~~~
frik
The German Heise News had an article:

 _Arduino against Arduino: Founder argue about the company_

English:
[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fmake%2Fmeldung%2FArduino-
gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html&edit-text=)

German: [http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-
Gruen...](http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruender-
streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html)

~~~
Alupis
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.

It's sad that HN is perpetuating this behavior.

~~~
pygy_
They're right. See [0] for the details.

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...](http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/)

~~~
Alupis
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.

~~~
pygy_
"Phony" is charitable.

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).

------
pierrec
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.

~~~
dustingetz
It's a UX issue, github needs a "thumbs-up" button

~~~
fapjacks
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.

~~~
winry
I think banning one-liners is a good start.

~~~
fapjacks
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.

~~~
jackmaney
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.

------
kls
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.

~~~
washadjeffmad
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.

~~~
andyjpb
[http://tuxgraphics.org/](http://tuxgraphics.org/)

------
abstractbeliefs
There's more info, including backstory, here:
[http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/arduino-ide-
forked/](http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/arduino-ide-forked/)

------
geofft
That barrage of thumbs-ups is making me worry about the day when one of my
projects gets significant attention on GitHub.

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?

~~~
masklinn
> 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.

> Are we back in the days of AOL-style "Me too!"?

We've never left it.

------
SEJeff
Another decent writeup:

[http://readwrite.com/2015/03/18/arduino-open-source-
schism](http://readwrite.com/2015/03/18/arduino-open-source-schism)

------
frik
Confused.

[https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/](https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/) ...
real Arduino

[https://github.com/arduino-org/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...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fmake%2Fmeldung%2FArduino-
gegen-Arduino-Gruender-streiten-um-die-Firma-2549653.html&edit-text=)

~~~
abstractbeliefs
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.

------
soyiuz
Dilute instead of trying suppress.

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.

------
jkot
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.

~~~
feld
[citation needed]

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...](http://assets.nagios.com/licenses/nagios_open_software_license.txt)

~~~
jkot
Apache v2

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

------
timdaub
I find the title of this submission slightly misleading, as I thought that
there can't be something like a _hostile_ fork.

FYI: The title has been updated, see:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9334255)

~~~
sctb
We updated the title from "Arduino is undergoing a hostile fork " to that of
the GitHub issue.

~~~
abstractbeliefs
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.

~~~
dang
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.

~~~
abstractbeliefs
Thank you for your feedback. I have also spoken to me peers who agree that the
original title was not in the correct spirit.

