Adafruit is wrong here

A missing piece of the puzzle that i feel is ommitted in Adafruits posting, is that the changes only affect the Arduino Cloud Services, which provide various github-like services for the arduino ecosystem. Looking over the changes with this in mind, it seems a lawyer just applied the same standard SaaS legal language to what is effectively a SaaS offering, pretty normal in most cases.

None of these changes will affect the Arduino open-source hardware project.

[EDIT] - confirmed: https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ all the legal language applies to the website, online services, forums, etc.

More precisely, from the TOS:

> 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”).

> 8.2 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

So yeah, it seems like the definition of "Platform" is limited only to their hosted services.

Yeah I already found it odd that it was about what “users uploaded” seeing that Arduino is not necessarily a platform to upload things to, it can be, but not necessarily.

Also Adafruit being a store, isnt there a matter of conflict of interest with posts like this?

And I can't imagine Qualcomms lawyers put much thought into this specific clause.

As soon as it becomes a PR nightmare, they might just take that clause out.

If true that's an absolutely gigantic omission, bordering on outright lying.

Yeah renders this whole article kinda dismissible imo

Arduino is as influential as it is controversial and has been from the beginning.

https://arduinohistory.github.io

https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...

You should submit Hernando Barragan's story as a top-level post on HN. Many people do not know of this and he certainly deserves all the recognition he can get.

I have a special kind of hatred for people who steal other folks work (even if it is freely given) without any acknowledgement.

It would be just desserts if Barragan teamed up with some high profile lawyers and went after Qualcomm/Arduino like the Winklewoss twins went after Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.

Thanks. I have no qualms about seeing Arduino getting “ripped off” then.

Really appreciate the link. I simply had no idea about this history. Just the sheer intellectual dishonesty is mind-boggling.

Jesus, they just ripped it off whole sale and claimed it was their own.

This is Legal Team not doing their due diligence. Just throwing a blanket terms of service update across all “properties”.

The new Arduino UNO Q features a beefy Qualcomm SOC running Linux, alongside an STM32 microcontroller which is programmable from the Arduino IDE. The MCU side is wide open, but the SOC side is full of proprietary firmware blobs, so I assume the lawyers are concerned about those being reverse engineered.

Arduino repos require a CLA since years, it was introduced 5 or 6 years ago if I remember correctly.

Isn't this quite useless, when they don't have the copyright on the initial version, since they didn't require a CLA back then?

CLA allows them to relicense your contributions under their own license - e.g. proprietary

A DCO would be the more friendly option.

I think the question is, what use is adding a CLA if the core functionality was under (A)GPL? Unless you go back and get all the OG contributors to sign over their rights, how can you relicense?

Yeah, exactly that's my point. The role of Arduino is like that of a Distro, they own the packet repository and the packet manager, and maintain a build-system and an IDE. They aren't the initial copyright holder to basically any library. The only thing they really own is the Arduino API, but this is an API not an implementation. The compiler is GCC, the board specific methods come from the hardware vendor, the C lib is newlib or comes also from the hardware vendor. The flasher software comes from a different company.

The libraries are written by random people, what Arduino does is adopt them after ~4-6 years of existing, slapping a "© Arduino LLC" on top and maybe fixing the packet manifest. The role of Arduino is a vendor and maintainer, they don't really are upstream for much things.

I don't really understand how what they try to achieve with these new "terms and conditions" is legally possible. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45978802) They could release new software with different licenses, but they would need to rewrite most of the ecosystem to do that. Neither MIT, nor LGPL, nor GPL nor AGPL contain any reference to "terms and conditions" of one of the copyright holders, which should be followed on top of the license.

You can’t sign the CLA if you are contributing code which you don’t have the right to relicense and isn’t appear under the CLA

I'm now realising I do not really know where the Arduino IDE gets all the libraries and board definitions from. I assume that's now Qualcomm owned web services with Qualcomm defined TOS?

I also wonder if anyone's backed/scraped the forums?

iirc the Arduino term is "cores", which implement the HAL for a different family of boards. Been a while since I looked deeper at it

https://docs.arduino.cc/learn/starting-guide/cores/