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arduino's response to the discourse is here:

https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...

I don't trust that reply.

I'm not saying the person(s) who wrote that is(are) lying. It's just that it doesn't seem to come from someone with authority to make decisions like that or even from someone well informed about the global strategy of the corporation.

To me "Arduino Team" is just a bunch of hopeful or even naive employees.

This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:

> 1.1 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”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by 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”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.

(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion)

That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.

Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...

Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.

The article is AI-written. Obviously can't be relied on to accurately convey the original information

"But Arduino isn’t SaaS. It’s the foundation of the maker ecosystem." is a giveaway, but the whole set of paragraphs of setup before that is chatgpt's style

Yeah no. Wishful thinking. History has shown that huge corporations taking over open source project generally results in a big change how those projects are governed and how the legalese like t&c turns out.

Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.

> The most dangerous change is Arduino now explicitly states that using their platform grants you no patent licenses whatsoever. You can’t even argue one is implied.

> This means Qualcomm could potentially assert patents against your projects if you built them using Arduino tools, Arduino examples, or Arduino-compatible hardware.

Yep, the complete opposite of "open".

Arduino has long been fraught with governance and licensing issues, but at its core has been supported first and foremost by a community of keen amateurs and patient professionals teaching in their off time.

This is a reminder - never sell out your baby unless you're willing to see it squeezed for every penny, community be damned.

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...

Do tinkerers still use Arduino? I have a couple of boards here, but since I moved to ESP32, I never used them again. The last usages I gave an Arduino board was for it to serve as a programmer for my ESP2688. And the Arduino IDE has been replaced with PlatformIO in VS Code.
Not sure if this really counts as tinkering, but the other day I needed a custom HID device for my PC. I ordered an Arduino Micro (I think?), one that supports HID out of the box, and with under 300 lines of code my problem was solved.

The Arduino HAL and the overall comfort of the Arduino IDE are genuinely valuable. I didn’t have to learn new flashing tools or a new debugging toolchain just to light a few LEDs, read some buttons, and emulate keypresses on a PC. The learning curve was basically zero.

I’ve worked with embedded systems before, and this level of simplicity is incredibly useful for people who just want to ship simple solutions to simple problems without fighting through vendor-specific, arcane tooling.

I've got some RP2350s since then with Micropython, now those might be even better for getting stuff done (without network or extreme low power needs)

I do. Mostly because I literally have dozens of them lying around ready to be reused for whatever my latest idea is. Admittedly the bulk of those are clones, not "official" Arduino products.

Other reasons I'll reach for an Arduino over alternatives like ESP, RasPi (Linux or 2040/2350) include:

Simplicity. I very much ascribe to KISS. Having WiFi or Linux as part of my hardware _always_ leads me into scope creep. If the idea could be done on an AT328 (or similar), in my head it _needs_ to be.

Robustness. I probably have thrown out dozens of 3.3V microcontrollers/SOCs with dead io pins because I fucked up. An Arduino will often shrug off shorting 12V to an io pin (or even vcc) without blinking. RasPis seem to sometimes get damaged just because you looked sideways at them while thinking about 12V.

Experience. For me, the way I come up with project ideas seems to often be fundamentally linked with "knowing" how I'll do it on an Arduino. I've been using them over 20 years now, practically since they first appeared. And I'd been writing code for ATMega chips since a Burningman project in 1999, struggling with a cross compiling gcc toolchain. Arduino IDE was both instantly familiar, and such a breath of fresh air for me back then. It allowed me to easily experiment, and lowered my barrier of entry to random weekend or evening project ideas.

Separateness from work. I find the low level coding on a bare 8 bit microcontroller to be almost a completely different thing to coding for work. When work is going badly and I'm approaching burnout, any personal time Linux based coding for RasPis pretty much grinds to a halt. I'll find myself reading a book or doomscrolling social media instead of tinkering with that kind of project. The Arduino IDE is different enough to "work tools" that it doesnt get affected quite as

No we don't.

I have dozens of Arduinos that I will never use.

With a similarly priced (sometimes cheaper) platform like the amazing rp2040 / rp2350 which is roughly 100 times more powerful, I have no idea what the niche is for them any more.

The way they dropped the ball with their IDE is amazing. It still looks and feels like something that was rejected during beta testing in 1993

Arduino is following roughly the same trajectory as BlackBerry, with the current phase being "rapidly fading into obscurity"

Same, esp32. Not liking the path that Arduino is on currently.
I don't know if I'll use Arduino in a professional project, but the existence of simavr and in-tree QEMU support means I can at least unit-test my code without dedicated test runners hooked up to hardware or licensing for Wokwi.

Indie devs who need testable builds might be a smaller market than tinkerers, but they're there.

It's a pain anticipating money flow into the future in more ways than one.

Everyone in my circles has moved to PlatformIO and mostly uses ESP32 boards, but almost exclusively through the Android framework/HAL and its various libraries.
I tried to get into it; built some simple LED thingies. Then kind of fatigued.

I semi-attribute this to my lack of willpower but perhaps arduino also isn't as tinker-epic as I thought it may be.

I actually use Teensy. I found that the ESP32 and its whole WiFi stack (?) were slowing the device down. It's not bare-bones enough for many of my projects.
Yup. Esp32 is just better.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45984143
Thanks, we'll put that in the top text as well.
This article is much, much better than the LinkedIn article though.
From Arduino ecosystem i always have a feeling that they try to do an unnecessary ecosystem lock-in. Most Arduinos are just Atmel AVR MCU with fancy bootloader. You do not need Arduino-this or Arduino-that for programming them, avr-gcc and avr-libc is enough.
From an embedded developer's perspective, Arduino is awful. That hero-loop programming is not what anyone should ever do. And experienced developers can get better results from something like FreeRTOS (or if you're a masochist Zephyr). And ESP32s are cheaper, as are RP2040s. ...

But take a room full of kids and get them to write a program that blinks an LED, or drive a simple 'robot' forward, and it's awesome. Easy to use. I've never burned out a board (even driving considerable current through them). Things are tolerably well marked. Lots of teaching tools. Lots of different suppliers of easy to connect motors, servos, lights, sensors, etc.

For the same reason, if you are not an embedded engineer, but need a simple micro-controller to turn something on an off like a heater in a chicken coop, it's fantastic. And if you want, buy the $5 knock-off Uno. It should be the same, except that it doesn't support the (now defunct) foundation.

I think it's important to understand the early development.

It's true that you can (and always could) use avr-gcc and libc, but the core sale was what makes it not this.

The "locked in"/captured API and IDE were directly extensions of a language and IDE called Processing.

Processing overlaid an art-focussed layer on top of Java, providing a simpler API, and an IDE with just two buttons.

Arduino was based on this - the same IDE format, similar API conventions (just on top of C++), precisely to allow these same artists to move into physical installations and art.

Arduino was not designed initially to be so general, it was tool written by and for this specific group of people, so has opinions and handrails that limit the space to provide the same affordances as Processing specifically.

There is no lock in, you can use avr-gcc with Arduino boards. Arduino is a portable SDK with HAL, you can add support for your own devices to it pretty easily
What's the point of paying a hefty sum of money for the right to destroy a product and a team neither or whom are in competition with you? Not the first time I see it happening
I remember 15 years ago when I was in highschool I really wanted to learn how to program 8 bit microcontrollers without Arduino. And everybody looked at me like I was crazy. There was barely any learning material out there about how to do this.

Now, I imagine the bias pushing everyone to learn on arduino is even more intense? Who out there is programming these chips in pure C using open source compilers and bootloaders?

Edit: Of course there's other platforms like Esp32; teensy; seed. But I've only programmed Esp32s using the arduino dev environment. Are there other good ways of doing it?

Arduino official response - https://blog.arduino.cc/2025/11/21/the-arduino-terms-of-serv...
Sad, I wrote my first ever programs on Arduino, learned C++ through it, and did my first OSS contribution by creating the Arduino MIDI Library, ~16 years ago.

I wouldn't be where I am if it wasn't for Arduino. Thank you to the OSH community for making these boards open to all back then.

That's sad. Perhaps a fork may be created, but right now I think it is true that arduino is dead. Guess we need an alternative now.
It doesn't look like they've made any drastic changes that would impel anyone to leave Arduino tomorrow, or in the foreseeable future, but if they keep going down this route I imagine the community will move to RPi. They've always been vastly more performant than Arduino and they can run linux, which is somewhat more approachable than the concept of programming a microcontroller and only being able to talk to it over serial.
I haven't even considered Arduino for anything in years. It's just way overpriced and oversized. For the same price as an Uno you can get a Raspberry Pi 4, or seven Picos.

Nonetheless, this looks like another step toward robbing everyone of something useful and reducing our options... not to mention encouraging others to do the same thing. Depressing.

Qualcomm wasted no time and tanking this purchase. Not sure how the MBA's thought this would be a good idea to change everything about a project. Wouldn't be surprised to see the prices of the boards go up $200 tomorrow at this rate.
https://github.com/arduino/arduino-ide

License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0

Who does the fork? Paging e.g. Adafruit and Sparkfun.

Please, before commenting on this article, be sure to read Qualcomm's reply posted by adhoc_slime: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007805
How safe is Raspberry Pi? Everybody seems to be using that now. Classic Arduino is too cramped.

(I always wanted something in the middle. Some QNX-like OS in ROM, but will run without a file system. About 1-2MB of RAM.

Qualcomm blew this up in record time, impressive stuff.
I see Gianluca Martino let arduino.com lapse/is squatting it. Maybe the experiment is done? Is Adafruit no longer #TeamArduinoCC ?
This was already covered in the previous thread you mentioned. Just merge the threads.
Well, I'd say the Qualcommisation of Arduino is happening as expected and apace.
Is Arduino actually used for anything serious? While I certainly appreciate how their whole ecosystem has made working with microcontrollers more accessible... even the most casual hobbyists I know very quickly move on to something like an ESP32.
Now that the Arduino style microcontroller and accessories ecosystem exists does it really matter if Arduino itself continues to exist?
Qualcomm would force arduino to focus at enterprise offering

its happy ending for both investor

Arduino merda.
Looks it's time to move on. New platform and tools will emerge, I'm sure of it. The only way we can fight corpos is not giving them money and not talking about them.