"Qualcomm-owned #Arduino quietly pushed a sweeping rewrite of its Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform."
(source: Adafruit https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adafruit_opensource-privacy-techpolicy-activity-7396903362237054976-r14H)
Oh boy, that was fast! Somehow we need to find more future-proof models for open-source hardware. Letting the market do its thing is showing its true colors once again. Pure evil! 👿
@henk Wow, they really decided to speedrun the enshittification process.
The "Arduino" brand will probably end up tainted, but I don't see why the community can't fork the last pre-Qualcomm version of the toolchain and preserve the ecosystem, even if it has to be under a different name. (Freeduino? Libduino? Hopefully someone can come up with something better...)
It's not like they can retroactively close off the releases that were already open source, they can only do it going forward, as they try to build more shitty corporate "cloud" features into the IDE.
There's nothing special about the Arduino-brand hardware, though. The concept of a really cheap dev board (as opposed to the $250+ ones traditionally made by for commercial developers) was a game-changer in its time, but now there are lots of them, including from Adafruit, and the barrier to producing new ones is a lot lower than in the past.
The challenge will be steering new users away from the "brand name" hardware/cloud.
@dalias @Kadin2048 @henk 8-bit microcontrollers don't have online threats, CVEs, viruses, or any of that newfangled stuff. I'd much rather buy a product where the software runs on an 8-bit than on some embedded Linux platform, because I'd much more expect it to just work, forever.
Bigger systems open the door to various flavours of enshittification. :-(
@EI3JDB @Kadin2048 @henk That's the same for any microcontroller not running some giant IoT-style OS. There's no reason to use the gratuitously bad 8-bit ones when there are 32-bit ones at same or lower price and with much better ISAs and tooling.
32-bit need not even be bigger (in terms of program ROM, SRAM, etc.); it just means you're not stuck doing wacky shuffling around between registers for basic arithmetic and stuff, using wonky addressing modes that aren't amenable to standard C, C++, or Rust, etc.
@dalias @Kadin2048 @henk My perspective may be different as my first paying gig (in 1982) was writing radio codecs in 8051 assembler. A lot of my career has been realtime assembler on little CPUs - often battery operated.
It seems to me that the little applications appropriate for embedded controllers often don't need much maths or data structures - and subroutines for maths functions is enough.
But agreed: if you want to write in Python or Java, a PIC16 is not going to scratch that itch.
LibArdui, pronounced similarly to "Liberty"
henk ✅
Kadin
Cassandrich
Alexander Knochel
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