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
This was always the plan.
Provide a platform to make sure low skill programmers learn to work with microcontrollers in anticipation of the industrial equipment maintenance wall coming up, then sell off the whole thing to some dildos once it’s up and rolling.
In this case the low skill programmers are recent college graduates and overseas gig workers repurposing open source codebases and the dildos is Qualcomm who needs to hedge their bread and butter baseband chips that everyone knows are comprised.
so why would anybody use one of their chips if that means suddenly they can come in and claim whatever you made is theirs and start selling it?
is that even legal? like i get youre signing their license agreement but if you use an arduino to make an automatic butt wiper or some shit can they really just swoop in and say “we made the chip so that’s ours now and we’re selling it”?
We’re in the “rip the copper wiring out of the walls” stage of capitalism. Everything is now blatantly and openly built on theft.
IP laws will still apply to regular folks (and will likely become more draconian), but for investment firms and public companies with shareholders, IP theft will be their bread and butter.
Based on the phrasing, as long as you don’t upload it to the forums or their library repository, they have no ownership.
Wow that’s unbelievably bad. So go with raspberry pi instead?
Raspberry pi is overkill (pi pico is fine I suppose) and too expensive for what most arduino boards do plus arduino is way easier to use. STM32 blue pill or any development board based on 8051, esp32/esp8266, offbrand boards with PIC16, nuvoton evaluation boards, psoc and renesas. A lot of the arduinos available in the market is fake anyway and you can use pioarduino instead of arduino ide but the convenience, ease of use, low price, adoption by the community (maker culture), open source libraries that you could add straight from the IDE made it quite accessible and it is often used to introduce children to electronics and robotics :/
Arduinos are too expensive for what Arduino boards do. 20€ for a 8 bit microcontroller and breakout board.
Pi Zero and Pico are a cheaper and way more powerful alternative.
It is a little more than 1 dollar where I live (probably duplicate but people still use their platform)
It is? That’s cheaper than ordering the microcontroller in bulk.
just the uno ones but the others aren’t far off
Yeah those are ~20€ https://store.arduino.cc/collections/black-friday/products/arduino-uno-rev3
I know that you can get knockoffs for a tenth of that price
I just get them from the local stores. Even the online stores here sell them at those prices. I wasn’t even aware I could buy it straight from arduino or that it costed that much. Most people here would never buy it at a price like that since I I live in the global south. I checked for pi zero and it costs 19 dollars here before taxes.
Tbh I don’t know anything about these other than that the two companies exist
That’s alright
Dunno if they still have him on staff, but a few years ago Raspberry Pi bragged about hiring an ex-cop who used to work on snooping gadgets.
If Qualcomm wants a market share in the makerscene they’d just need to make arm SOCs that have Linux mainline support before they go out of production.
I’d be all over that shit.
Only took a few weeks to enshitify this one.
Good job Qualcomm
I will abandon the few Arduino based projects I had, and toss the hardware. I will never use anything arduino based again so good job Qualcomm
You can just convert the wiring code into C++ code and use the microcontroller tool chain directly. No reason to toss good hardware.
Really disappointing even if expected. Arduino μC boards had the lowest barrier to entry out of any I’ve seen to the point where I’ve used them often for hobby projects over better performing dev boards. I even used them professionally a few times in a pinch when I didn’t have the time/budget to bring up the project on a first party dev board.
What do they mean by upload? The ➡️ button?
Without prejudice to any ownership rights of User of Content (defined below) which User publishes, for the purpose of allowing the functioning of the Platform and the Services (including the Forum and Project Hub), User grants to Arduino the non-exclusive, royalty free, transferable, sub-licensable, perpetual, irrevocable, to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law, for the duration of intellectual property rights and without detriment to User’s statutory rights (including applicable data protection rights), right to use the Content published and/or updated on the Platform as well as to distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish and make publicly visible all material, including software, libraries, text contents, images, videos, comments, text, audio, software, libraries, or other data (collectively, “Content”) that User publishes, uploads, or otherwise makes available to Arduino throughout the world using any means and for any purpose, , including the use of any username or nickname specified in relation to the Content. Should the Content be software created by User pursuant to the Contributor License Agreement, such Content shall be subject to the terms of the Contributor License Agreement. User expressly acknowledges that Content may include User’s Personal Data and, where applicable, Personal Data of minors for whom User is the legal guardian.
from their license agreement
What’s the platform? Because usually Arduino platform referes to the hardware+toolchain+ide and none of those even have a feature for sharing code. And the upload feature in the IDE flashes the program on the chip.
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.
is that shit even “”““legal””“” (a bourgeois court would probably rule it so)
There are so many alternatives now (almost all of which are cheaper, many of which (micropython) are easier) that this just seems extremely self-defeating.
Micropython is such a neat little library/language.
The file based system is such a nice idea and so much less finicky than the comile/upload workflow. Plus getting a terminal you can directly run microython code from is great for debugging.
