Not only the steps do to this properly would probably kill most companies, but investors would avoid such company like the plague.
They'd basically need to lose all protection on their product, making it a de facto open source (note that there are companies operating on open source stuff, but they actually make money out of the things they don't open source - such as "pro version" or know how). Plus, investors value the pool of recurring customers far more than basic cash flow or such (because you can squeeze them more) and the next best thing is customers you can make recurring customers by moving your product to a subscription model.
Hi (co founder of Arduino here) Good old Arduino is still here, we're still releasing a ton of tools for the community, we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering. I believe this is a natural progression for companies like us. Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere.. The R&D on the Professional products eventually benefits everyone. I strongly disagree with your statement
Not sure if you're as naive as your comments here, or just spouting the standard jargon, but even "We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering" and " Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology" are in complete disagreement. "They never interfere" - right... I don't doubt you strongly disagree, but history says you're wrong. Maybe Arduino will be the exception but I wouldn't bet on it. You took the money; you made the deal. If ever it comes to a decision that would negatively impact your investors or hold to the original ideals, which way do you think it will go?
That depends entirely on how much control the investors have. For a company as old and established as Arduino and for only $22 million, I’d guess it’s not all that much.
Don't waste time disagreeing with people on social media, just prove them wrong by doing the right thing. People are really downhearted by how things have turned out in the tech industry, but maybe someday we will point to Arduino as one of the companies who turned that around. Good luck!
To word this differently... We here on HN have seen this go wrong 1000 times. But we hope Arduino is the project that manages to accept VC funding and still stay true to its opensource maker roots.
I believe in mentioning origins the parent is referencing your unceremonious fork of the Wiring project
The Arduino corporation has been a great benefit to open source but it's also a classic trope of an advisor taking credit (and profits) for his students' work.
> we're still innovating every day. We're using most of the funds to develop our professional offering
You're not disagreeing with parent commenter and could both be correct!
> Our investors leave free to work on whatever technology and let us open source anything we feel can contribute to the community. They never interfere
At some point, they will expect, then demand returns on their investments, then your focus will mostly be on the professional offering, while the community product gets less love.
It's not a condemnation of your as an individual or your organization: this cycle has played out many times via VC or acquisition.
Have you discussed this with your VCs? Which methods of maximizing revenue have they agreed you will be leaving on the table in perpetuity?
What will happen if you don't make the returns they expect? Do you have a controlling share, or is it possible for them to fire you and replace you with a more compliant CEO?
This sort of thing tends to be a collaboration, until the growth doesn't meet expectations.
Hey thanks for commenting here. I think many people in hn don't realize that Foss projects maintained and managed by a company are used to further a commercial goal otherwise ardunio would go under and then it doesn't matter the state of the Foss stuff. If in the future for whatever reason the sentiment for the Foss portion changes the community can always fork it, or continue development. That's the beauty of open source software.
I'm also biased since I'm building a vc backed product as well.
Super stoked to see how your professional and enterprise offerings turn out. Do you have a public roadmap anywhere?
Glad to see you chime in here. Just curious, is Arduino setup so that the community could takeover if you did somehow go pure enterprise and abandon hobbyists? If I recall, things are pretty open source.
Everything except the name is properly opensource for the OG arduino (Arduino Uno).
For some more recent boards, there are proprietary components and binary tools and blobs - notably the Expressif board packages for the ESP8266 and ESP32's. At least some of the blame for that is with the chip manufacturers and not the Arduino project.
Even professionals have limits. I've worked in companies with the kind of management which kept adding this bad proxy metrics and pushing initiatives which had a totally expectable bad effects on the product quality. Most devs used to fight the management on this, but grew progressively tired of this continuous fight. At some point the experienced devs either left or just gave up and started giving the management what they asked. Us juniors followed suit. The management was happy, the actual workload diminished because we let go of "low priority" tasks and we even go a juicy bonus at the end of the year because of how good we were doing.
The company tanked six months after that, now it doesn't exist anymore.
There's only so much you can do when the management is hellbent on doing stupid things.
You might be misconstruing the point. I certainly wasn’t insinuating more and more metrics. If anything, it’s the opposite: a core understanding of what’s really important helps you focus on the few metrics that matter.
In that context, I’m not really sure what point you’re making, unless it’s just to share a personal anecdote. Are you implying that management shouldn’t have any quantitative measures and should only be qualitative?
You need good quantitative measures, not just random numbers.
If you sell, say, water bottles, you probably want to know how many of them you can sell at any given moment, in order to not overbook and have to reimburse people. In this case, keeping track of how many water bottles you do have in stock probably helps, keeping track of how many labels with funny jokes you can stick on a shipping box in an hour doesn't. But if you start tracking the latter and handing down bonuses and layoffs based on it, people will max that metrics out - at the expense of your actual stock capacity.
Quantitative measures are dangerous, especially in the hands of people who believe they are better than qualitative ones because they're "objective" or whatever. Because not only they aren't, but they are also better than qualitative ones at hiding their biases and soothing your own.
> Are you implying that management shouldn’t have any quantitative measures and should only be qualitative?
Many managers would do a lot better this way. They'd still make stuff up, but would at least be forced to admit it.
Malicious compliance is exactly what you get when people think your target is stupid and you put some automated, non-negotiable measurement in place.
If I was a developer there, I'd totally started adding those generated tests. I have a job to do (ship products) and you put in some stupid requirements which actually interfere with it (since my time is limited I can either work on tests or my daily tasks like developing new features or fixing bugs), but we both know that if my primary job suffers, I'll pay for it. So the best solution, from my point of view, is the one that takes that requirement away and lets me go on actually working.
When we had a similar problem in a previous company, we just created an epic, assigned a couple of people to it and have them churning out tickets for specific improvements, like "Class X has a coverage of Y on this method, add tests for the missing execution branches", which were clear, non-generic and fully integrated in our flow. If anybody complained about our velocity or whatever, we could show them the full trail which lead us to choose to work on that ticket and how much we spent on it. The coverage issue got solved in less than a month.
>If I was a developer there, I'd totally started adding those generated tests.
If I were a manager there, I probably wouldn’t hire you. You want people who are actively solving problems that matter, not just automatons beating their chest about how stupid everyone else is while they add to existing problems.
I you were a manager there and would approve that metric, no worries, I'd manage to fly it past you.
Any smart manager, having to deal with this kind of policy, would either push back or approve any way to game it and then get the work done. But I doubt that a company which allows this kind of BS can retain smart managers for more than a couple of months.
If you read any of my posts on this thread, it’s pretty obvious I don’t agree with the managers approach. But I also don’t agree that the devs are doing the right thing either.
It’s telling that you show such dichotomous and defensive thinking.
I made the point that the metric used (raw number of tests) is a bad way to enforce a good goal (higher code quality). I also made the point that metrics aren’t inherently bad, but they have to be chosen judiciously.
You seemed to take those two points and extrapolate an entirely different story as a personal affront and apply motives that, frankly, reads as a bit unhinged. So i also hope we don’t cross paths, because in safety critical code development where I come from where bad practices and toxic teammates can kill people.
Are you seriously asking this question in 2023? Nobody makes web pages anymore, just make an app and require access to a ton of user data just to sell them for shady purposes.
Italian government and enshittification, name a more iconic duo, I'll wait.
They built (more correctly, paid) for the IO app for it to be the one touch point for interacting with the government, then started cutting off features from it in other apps. Now they want to aggregate everything again on CIE, which not everyone has yet. Then you have local governments (looking at you, Lombardia) which build random apps which technically support SPID (something like state-provided SSO) and CIE (SAME THING) but wrap them through their custom authentication system because what's better than multiple passwords for the same account? Which already has 2FA?
Man, I wonder if they ever use the crap they build.
I don't know everyone else, but this is certainly not how I expected technology to evolve in general. A completely unnecessary over-engineered world. For me no technology has to negatively interfere with what you're supposed to do and more important, there always has to be a human back up alternative. Is infuriating to assume that every single human being is supposed to have a smart phone to pay for parking. I do really feel sorry for the elders the way they are being technologically-excluded.
In general, they tend to get snapped up by other corporate roles, either officially (which at least grants them the pay benefits associated with the role) or unofficially.
I know a lot of great coders who ended up doing anything but code because they were the technical people with communication skills.
I'll agree that publishers (especially of academic stuff) deserve even a cent for every book sold the moment they do something useful in the whole publication process. Because at this moment, their contribute is negative.
Until then (which probably means forever), I hope Sci-Hub and similar keep thriving.
That's true for basically all the "gig economy" apps, which are just enormous money sinks which fuck over (disrupt, according to their propaganda) whatever market they enter and then either collapse leaving a rotting corpse where a functional market used to exist or become monopolists and then proceed to level the market in order to milk it up as much as possible. And then they collapse anyway.
If we had any kind of sense, as a society, this shit would have been banned years ago.
They'd basically need to lose all protection on their product, making it a de facto open source (note that there are companies operating on open source stuff, but they actually make money out of the things they don't open source - such as "pro version" or know how). Plus, investors value the pool of recurring customers far more than basic cash flow or such (because you can squeeze them more) and the next best thing is customers you can make recurring customers by moving your product to a subscription model.