
Is Arduino no longer open-source? - ptorrone
http://lists.oshwa.org/pipermail/discuss/2017-June/002127.html
======
madarco
Having worked in the Open Hardware community for a while, I think the most
important part is:

PDFs are not considered design files
[https://www.oshwa.org/definition/](https://www.oshwa.org/definition/)

If you apply this rule, you can exclude 90% of the "Open Source/Hardware"
products on the market.

Also 99% are missing a BOM (Bill Of Materials). That's like shipping an open
source software without the config files, forcing the users to figure out the
settings by reading the sources. Unless they are buying the pre-compiled
binaries from the author.

~~~
vog
_> PDFs are not considered design files
[https://www.oshwa.org/definition/](https://www.oshwa.org/definition/) _

This is a very good point!

BTW, in that sense most Creative Commons work is not "open source", either.

For example, a typical Creative Commons video that is just released as webm or
mp4 can only be remixed, but not improved upon - which would require access to
the raw video material, raw audio material and the project file of the used
video cut program.

Same for CC music distributes just as mp3/flac/opus, you'll need the samples,
notes, music cut program file, and so on. One notable exception are tracker
files (mod, s3m, it, ...), and in some sense also the MIDI files (as long as
you have access to all instruments).

~~~
jononor
The definition from OSHWA is tailored for hardware. OSI has the authorative
for software.

But yeah, music and graphics frequently also don't include the actual 'source'
\- just a rendered output. This is way better that having a propiatary license
on the output, but does not fulfill the full potential.

Some of it has to so with the tools and proceses, which frequently aren't
really built to make collaborating on the source materials easy. And often the
formats and tools used are proprietary. Freeware VSTs abound for instance...

~~~
iuguy
Perhaps a key difference is that OSHWA isn't authoritative.

OSHWA are the FSF of hardware. As far as they're concerned, only their
certification constitutes open hardware. Everyone else is wrong. Sound
familiar?

As someone else pointed out, a lot of people don't provide BOM files,
including people who have OSHWA certified hardware.

------
ajarmst
My colleagues have developed a "spitting noise" ritual after any utterance of
the word "Arduino" (<hock> ptui). As embedded developers attempting to teach
others, they're not enamored of Arduino's burgeoning, and dominant, market of
"people who want to do embedded development but not learn anything about
embedded development" sucking up all the oxygen. I know, that's an
oversimplification, but not as much of one as I could wish.

I don't want to wish anyone ill, but the emergence and success of competitors
that don't go so far out of the way to hide the complexity (and the need for
good practice) of working with embedded systems and SBCs, wouldn't be such a
bad addition to the ecosystem.

(As one of two developers who actually fool around with Arduinos and Pis a
fair bit (although I detest the Arduino dev environment and 'sketches'), I'm
tired of all the vandalism and graffiti in my cubicle, TBH).

~~~
zer00eyz
Lets view what your saying through another lens:

My colleagues have developed a "spitting noise" ritual after any utterance of
the word "PC" (<hock> ptui). As MAINFRAME developers attempting to teach
others, they're not enamored of PC's burgeoning, and dominant, market of
"people who want to do COMPUTER development but not learn anything about
MAINFRAME development" sucking up all the oxygen. I know, that's an
oversimplification, but not as much of one as I could wish.

I don't want to wish anyone ill, but the emergence and success of competitors
that don't go so far out of the way to hide the complexity (and the need for
good practice) of working with COMPUTERS systems and MAINFRAMES, wouldn't be
such a bad addition to the ecosystem.

(As one of two developers who actually fool around with PC's and APPLES a fair
bit (although I detest the APPLE dev environment and 'PRODOS'), I'm tired of
all the vandalism and graffiti in my cubicle, TBH).

Am I suggesting that this is going to be how things turn out? No probably not.
It baffles me that many people who code, have little to no understand of their
mainframe roots and commit sins that were solved ages ago. However some of
this reaction is to the simplification and replacement of technology with
things that are more affordable and more in reach even if they aren't the
same.

~~~
ajarmst
There's another plane on which the analogy fails: the first generation of PC
enthusiasts were working with a genuinely new thing. The consumer/hobbyist-
grade hardware that the introduction of the 4004/8008/6502 made possible was
quite literally impossible only a few years prior. And there was good
competition (OK, we Apple ][ folks despised the 'Trash-80', and everyone
looked askance when the Commodore 64 with its glitzy marketing toward people
who didn't even _own_ soldering irons showed up, but we peripherally
recognized each other as factions of the same tribe, and there were options).

Neither of those things is true of the Arduino. I learned how to design simple
control systems on Microsequence Controllers ancestral to the AVR more than
_thirty years ago_. And the techniques I learned there still apply to the more
sophisticated chips available now. Even the hobbyist platform stuff isn't new.
I was wire-wrapping DIP 650*'s into perf-board in the early 1990's, and I
built an HC11 model rocket launch controller for my kid the better part of two
decades ago. And I know more than a dozen people, not all of them professional
engineers, many with only two-year college diplomas who were doing
sophisticated hobbyist projects well before the turn of the millennium.

The Arduino isn't analogous to the Apple ][. We had to learn how to program in
BASIC and needed to know what a memory map was. It's analogous to Windows 95:
a well-engineered product that completely dominates the market, establishes
that you don't really need to know anything, and stifles innovation.

~~~
bb611
> stifles innovation

I'm really curious about this - what innovation does Arduino stifle?

From my position with some school level dabbling in embedded, it seems like
the industry is quite healthy and that there is a lot of innovation happening
in terms of hardware outside Arduino, especially on the commercial side of
things, where the perception is that Arduino has next to no market share.

------
Squonk42
The answer to the question if these products are open source, the answer is:
no.

Here is my blog post from more than 2 years ago regarding the status of the
Arduino Yùn:

[http://www.wifi4things.com/arduino-yun-what-is-under-the-
hoo...](http://www.wifi4things.com/arduino-yun-what-is-under-the-hood/)

And here is my clarification request on the Arduino forum, which is still
unanswered:

[http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=187766.0](http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=187766.0)

~~~
r3bl
I would say that the Betteridge's law of headlines has been proven once again
by this thread, but this is no article and the headline here seems more click-
baity than the actual subject line of the thread.

~~~
livingparadox
The answer to your parent comment's question is "no", but their question was
the inverse of the post's title.

So, this actually is an exception to Betteridge's law; the answer to the
question is "yes, arduino is no longer open source".

------
iuguy
Hopefully I can provide a bit of insight on this, currently working on open
hardware myself.

OSHW certification is a self-certification process. Individual products are
certified, not companies. What Torrone is doing is conflating Arduino the
company (or foundation, or companies, or whatever it is this week, guys please
stahp) and Arduino the product _series_ , and individual Arduino products. He
knows what he's doing, but in this email does it anyway. Perhaps for good
cause, but it's what he's doing.

There is no requirement for Arduino to certify all of it's hardware with
OSHWA. In fact given the explosion of things-that-are-branded-arduino it would
be unsurprising to see hardware that cannot be certified as open due to
commercial agreements that override open licences. Whether this affects
Arduino or not long term is a different matter but the Uno, Nano and Pro Mini
are all still open.

OSHWA is an attempt to define what constitutes Open Source Hardware and to
define some (hopefully) sane defaults. It's the hardware equivalent of the
FSF, and it's licence is the maker equivalent of the GPL. It is not the only
fruit.

My project[1] uses the V-USB library, which comes with an open licence[2]. The
project is derived from another project, the digispark[3]. We're operating
within the licence constraints, and consider our project to be open hardware
(we're posting our board designs when we ship at the end of this month).

To further complicate things, when Arduino uses the term Open Source it rarely
clarifies what that means. It may be referring to the software stack. It might
be (but probably isn't in this day and age) referring to new hardware.

Either way, while it is right to pressure Arduino to clarify their position, I
think it's unfair to mandate that every product they ever produce must comply
with OSHWA's definition of Open Source Hardware, or that only OSHWA certified
hardware can be considered "open hardware".

[1] - [https://hidiot.com/](https://hidiot.com/)

[2] -
[https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html](https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html)

[3] - [https://digistump.com/](https://digistump.com/)

~~~
mch82
The OSHWA requirements for compatible open hardware licenses [1] seem to allow
for permissive open source licenses, similar to Apache 2.0. Attribution may or
may not be required. Derivative works are required to follow the terms of the
original license, but there doesn't seem to be a default requirement "share-
alike".

[1]: [https://www.oshwa.org/definition/](https://www.oshwa.org/definition/)

------
thearn4
I think the Arduino civil war is inevitably going to lead to ESP8266/NodeMCU
boards taking over this market.

~~~
dheera
What counts as "open source"?

We often run (open-source) Linux on a (closed-source) Intel processor and even
a lot of diehard FOSS warriors are okay with that.

Arduino Unos are a bunch of (open-source) wiring and components plugged into a
(closed-source) Atmel microcontroller and people seemed to be okay with that.

How does an ESP8266 differ from an ATMega in this regard? If we consider it a
basic component just like the ATMega, it's not particularly any different.

~~~
chillingeffect
This question comes up a lot.

It doesn't mean "open source all the way to the materials mined."

It means "open source to what _I_ used to produce this.*

Such that another person could replicate your work.

~~~
dheera
Sure. But just like one could source an ATMega, one could source an ESP8266
and replicate the work. It's an easily-available drop-in component. So I don't
actually see anything inherently different about the new crop of Arduinos from
what we had before.

------
mungoid
I started with arduino a few years ago as a hobby and loved it as an easy way
to get into the field but lately I have been realizing how many terrible
habits I've obtained by learning this way. It took me weeks to retrain my
brain to prefer looking at schematics instead of the breadboard views and I'm
still trying to learn atmel studio and directly programming chips. It's coming
along but slowly.

I still think arduino is a great way for interested people to break into
electronics but there is no clear 'line in the sand' when they should stop
learning that way

~~~
TickleSteve
Do yourself a favour and just use 'make' and 'g++' directly, ignore the
Arduino wrappers, they're just toys that hamper you after a while.

~~~
colejohnson66
How?

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
The wrappers are slow. I have a project where I need to sample data at 50kHz
and update at 5kHz, 14-bit output. Can't do it with Arduino's syntactic sugar.

The IDE is terrible for large, multi-file projects. It just doesn't have the
level of integration of, e.g., Visual Studio (that Atmel Studio is based on).

It's a fantastic beginner tool and a great source of ultra-cheap hardware, but
the IDE runs out of steam pretty quickly.

------
knob
Good questions on AdaFruit's side. I am interested in knowing what is the
result of this inquiry.

------
amenghra
Also relevant: [http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-
distributors-w...](http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-distributors-
were-the-real-arduino/)

~~~
Retr0spectrum
[http://hackaday.com/2016/10/01/arduino-vs-arduino-arduino-
wo...](http://hackaday.com/2016/10/01/arduino-vs-arduino-arduino-won/)

------
reacweb
Creators do not like to follow rules. Avoidance of a bunch of nitpicks is
probably the only way to motivate them.

IMHO, it is not a war, just a childish fight that is mostly positive.

------
nerfhammer
3/5 of the boards mentioned here have not actually been publicly released as
far as I can tell (Primo, Star Otto, Star LCD).

------
boznz
You cannot remove the open-Source from something that was previously open-
source. I'm pretty sure its a one way street.

~~~
njyx
Once you've licensed something as open-source and published, that version with
that license will always be there. You could take a future private version of
the thing (assuming no code contributions) and license that differently.

~~~
dragonwriter
Well, except that gratuitous licenses are (irrespective of their surface
terms) revocable at will. Promissory estoppel may mitigate, in some way, the
effect of such revocation against people who took action in reliance on a
promise of nob-revocation before or without knowledge of the subsequent
revocation, but it is far from clear that the Free version will always be
free; license terms don't override the governing law.

(Now if there is a Free version under a contracted-for rather than gratuitous
license, that's a bit more secure, though there are ways that could go away,
too.)

~~~
SwellJoe
Do you have any court cases to back this assertion? The GPL is the license of
millions (maybe billions) of lines of code. We've all bet on them being non-
reversible on released code.

Given the way Linux is copyrighted (with _many_ holders), it'd be an absurd
situation if any copyright holder could just decide, after the fact, that they
don't want their code being distributed under that license anymore. In
fact...I think that's been litigated in SCO vs. IBM. So...what are you basing
your legal theory on here?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Given the way Linux is copyrighted (with many holders), it'd be an absurd
> situation if any copyright holder could just decide, after the fact, that
> they don't want their code being distributed under that license anymore.

Even leaving _aside_ general issued on the revocability of licenses that
aren't special to copyright law, the US has a special provision making _all_
licenses _and transfers_ of rights by authors under copyright revocable by
written notice, during a 5 year window 35 years from when they occurred; see
17 USC Sec. 203.

> So...what are you basing your legal theory on here?

The general American (Anglo-American, I think, as I'm fairly certain the
principle is a common law one which is older than the US) of licenses.

~~~
SwellJoe
17 USC Sec. 203 also covers derivative works and the fact that they remain
distributable under the original terms (though future derivative works are up
in the air if your interpretation holds water, which I still don't really
buy).

Further, revocation of copyright on works with multiple authors must be signed
off on by a majority of copyright holders, per the law you've cited. That's
literally impossible with something like Linux (but maybe not with something
like Arduino, if it only has a tiny number of authors, I don't know).

If it's so simple and obvious, why has it never happened in 30+ years of GPL
software, when billions of dollars are at stake?

"The general American (Anglo-American, I think, as I'm fairly certain the
principle is a common law one which is older than the US) of licenses."

Many things in "common law" have been replaced by written legislation and case
law. Modern copyright bears no resemblance, and only has only tenuous
connections, to common law. Copyright is among the most debated and litigated
categories of law in the modern world, with legislation, legal precedent, and
even international treaties covering it. If your position is that it is as you
say because common law is as you say, that just sounds really shaky. Now, I
need to ask you to back up the assertion that "common law" is the law in force
on copyright in any developed Western nation, because that seems to be the
crux of your interpretation of the law.

I don't know, man. I'm not an expert, by any means, but I'm just not following
your reasoning here, at all.

My understanding of the GPL is that it is a one way street for released code.
New releases can be under a new license if all of the authors agree to it, but
once something is out there under the GPL, it is always under the GPL. Nothing
you've said makes me think otherwise because the weight of precedent seems to
disagree with you.

------
ejanus
Adafruit is not as cool as one might expect. I was sourcing boards from them
and my parcel got missing from courier company. I complained to them.
Initially they tried to help but nothing came out of it. Guess what they did
next ? My account with them was disabled . It almost knocked my little startup
off the ground. I wrote mails but to no avail.

