I saw this the other day. I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade. I don’t know much about Qualcomm, but at least on the face of it, they’re keeping Arduino alive and infusing a lot of cash and expanding the platform, and they’re also keeping the board designs fully open source. It seems reasonable (and probably necessary in today’s world) to have terms on the cloud services. Arduino’s website itself was never open source, the chips they’ve always used aren’t open source. And it was Arduino’s decision to sell to Qualcomm, right? Why should the cloud services be open source?
> I’m not sure exactly what the concerns are, nor why Qualcomm deserves any shade.
Yeah, the missing subtext here is the opinions of the folks who have worked with Qualcomm’s (software) org and products professionally. They’re… not beloved.
Arduino has four layers, only two were ever truly open:
1 Hardware reference designs (sort of open by intent)
2 Core software (open-source licensing)
3 Services and “happy path” tooling (not open)
4 Brand and governance (never open)
Qualcomm’s move is about owning layer 4 and using it to grow layer 3, while keeping layers 1 and 2 open enough to preserve credibility and community adoption.
That makes sense to me. Adafruit’s complaint relates to layer 3, right? Is Qualcomm changing the openness of layers 1 & 2 in meaningful ways that affect makers & hobbyists? And I guess layer 1 is PCB design, not [MC]PU design, right? Is that what you mean by ‘sort of’?
