"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.
LibArdui, pronounced similarly to "Liberty"
henk ✅
Kadin
Sean