According to Adafruit, the new policies introduce sweeping user-license provisions, broaden data collection (particularly around AI usage), and embed long-term account data retention, all while integrating user information into Qualcomm’s broader data ecosystem.
Section 7.1 grants Arduino a perpetual, irrevocable license over anything you upload. Your code, projects, forum posts, and comments all fall under this. This remains in effect even after you delete your account. Arduino retains rights to your content indefinitely.
The license is also royalty-free and sublicensable. Arduino can use your content however they want, distribute it, modify it, and even sublicense it to others.
The terms further state that users are not allowed to reverse engineer or attempt to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission. Adafruit argues that this contradicts the values that made Arduino attractive to educators, researchers, and hobbyists.
The Privacy Policy states Arduino is wholly owned by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. User data, including from minors, flows to other Qualcomm Group companies.
qualcomm bought arduino around a month ago
https://projecthub.arduino.cc/ and their forum and the IDE does have a library manager which I assume is code uploaded by the community. They also have cloud and subscription services apparently and the data also includes more than just the code and stuff pertaining to edge ai.
Ok if that’s all I honestly don’t really give a fuck. Still not great, probably pretty annoying for companies like adafruit in particular.
Of course this might just be step one before they discontinue support for offline development or something nasty like that.
It’s an end-run around the GPL and other copyleft license schemes. This is a big deal. It is limited in scope, but nothing is stopping Microsoft from doing something similar with Github, for instance. This is the legal blueprint all these companies will use for feeding the corpus of copyleft software into their language models, committing industrial scale copyright infringement, and spitting out thousands of proprietary applications with GPL code inside them. I mean, they’re already doing this, but this is the permission slip they will march into court with.
You say that like corpos aren’t already using every piece of GPL code they can get their hands on in their training data.