Open source Project / Hardware

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

That's actually part of the Creative Commons licenses and not something I necessarily think needs to or should be there, but that's what the license says, and that same clause is (I believe) in the licenses you're using for your works as well.

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

That's actually part of the Creative Commons licenses and not something I necessarily think needs to or should be there, but that's what the license says, and that same clause is (I believe) in the licenses you're using for your works as well.

??? jeez that's kinda retarded. well if its in the Default License then there's not reason to take it out. Sorry for the rant, I take it back! I thought this was an addition to the as-yet-unpublished Arduino License.

I read CC many years ago but didn't remember it. Mea culpa :slight_smile:

limor

ps. I still think its still a silly clause :slight_smile:

you know,

I'm starting to think that the files and the Arduino name should BOTH be open to anyone who wants to use them :slight_smile:

Then the team can promote, trademark and enforce a franchise on Diecimila, BT, NG, etc.

That just seems too darn simple. That way it's entirely equitable to all involved, as everyone has access to the Arduino name and designs to use as they see fit. Some will produce junk, some will produce fine quality things like Diecimila.

I think it's a mistake to think that the team really "owns" the Arduino name anyway... in theory, yes... but

a) it would cost 5 to 10K dollars per instance to prosecute offenders, and
b) the name gained its current value with the contribution of hundred of other people.

We're not talking Linux here :slight_smile:

Daniel

you know,

I'm starting to think that the files and the Arduino name should BOTH be open to anyone who wants to use them :slight_smile:

Well, I think it's probably better that they hold on to the name. It's a unique brand and also keeps confusion down. Someone could, otherwise, buy a thing with the word Arduino on it and be confused as to why its not working the way they expect or is incompatible with the software and then blame Arduino when really its that the clone is not compatible.

Just like generic drugs are the same as brand name, they can say "compare ingredients with Advil!" but they cant say "Advil"

Sure, but don't you find this less confusing:

"Arduino" refers to so many things:

  • open software
  • open hardware designs
  • many many tutorials and documents of unknown copyright,
  • a community
  • a way of learning and doing electronics.

Whereas the anmes of the boards are crystal-clear:
Diecimila = Arduino team produced board
Barebones = Paul Badger's board
Arduino Runtime= NKC electronics' board
Carduino= your board

People know the difference.

The "confusion" claim, i.e. that people will mix up who makes what product, doesn't pan out. Trademarking Arduino would be more about protecting the franchise that extends beyond the boards: community, hardware design control, etc. I'm saying that maybe that should be totally open, name and all. We can still have high-quality Diecimila boards. It's not like anyone is goign to run out and make copies so that they can shave that extra $4 off the profit margin.... it's not worth their while.

Anyway it has the same ring as Suse Linux, RedHat Linux, etc, so we need to be at least able to freely use the Arduino name under license, that much is clear.
D

Someone could, otherwise, buy a thing with the word Arduino on it and be confused as to why its not working the way they expect or is incompatible with the software and then blame Arduino when really its that the clone is not compatible.

just to argue that point on a purely objective level :slight_smile: , I think it's FUD, as there aren't any non-compatible Arduino products that I know of. Anyone who buys a Barebones Arduino (which uses the name but doesn't match the specs of the original) knows they are getting a slimmed-down version of the original, and that the product has been engineered to be compatible with Arudino software. Buyers don't turn around and blame anyone... In fact it seems like Paul's use of the Arduino name and his derivative design works just fine in practice! No collapse of the Arduino empire in sight!

By contrast, the VAST majority of complaints/ compatibility questions in the forum are about the team-produced, officially sanctioned Arduino NG, Arduino BT or Diecimila. Yes they have sold a lot more of those, but still, You would be hard pressed ot find complaint threads about the Barebones.

You could actually make a pretty reasonable argument that Paul should be worried about the Arduino problems turning people off of the Barebones! ;D OK I meant that just in principle.

D

I think we're definitely going to hold on to the name Arduino in the same way as most every other open-source project (e.g. Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Firefox). While Arduino has become a great community and has benefited from the contribution of many people, there's still a need to preserve the identity and that needs to be controlled in some way. Otherwise, people who aren't part of the community, or who don't agree with the goals of the project, or who just want to sell out the community for a quick buck would have the right to use it as well. Yes, we want to do what's best for the community, but that doesn't mean letting anyone do anything they want.

Otherwise, people ... who just want to sell out the community for a quick buck would have the right to use it as well.

that's FUD too :slight_smile:

Well, Linux is trademarked

"You need to apply for a sublicense if you are using the term β€œLinux” as part of your own trademark or brand identifier for Linux-based software goods or services. It doesn't matter if your trademark is unregistered, or if you do not plan to make any money using the mark."

and at http://www.ubuntu.com/
"Ubuntu is a community developed, linux-based operating system" (emph mine)
Ubuntu doesn't call itself "Ubuntu Linux" and their registered trademark is for "Ubuntu" only.

If you read the faq linuxmark are pretty chill with the usage, as long as you aren't putting it on software.

I think the Arduino team is pretty chill, they'll probably sublicense the name to anybody who asks nicely :slight_smile:

limor

yes but... the reality is that the Arduino foundation could never afford what it costs to oversee world wide trademark compliance. In addition to that, they would have to immediately start sending "Cease and desist" letters to those who have used the trademark on their products, as trademarks have to be defended consistently in order to be valid. Those cost $500 a pop, and you would just pray that the person desists, because if they don't, it'll cost you thousand more. Any smart infringer's lawyer will just bog things down, so that the trademark enforcer can no longer afford to pay the mounting legal costs of enforcement. This is the sad but true fact of it. If your trademark lawyer spends four hours on defending your trademark one week, the bill will be in excess of $1000. If it takes forty hours... well then you're screwed. and if it goes to court, you're really, really screwed.

Take it form Linus Torvalds himself, who said the following while explaining the licensing fees charged by the Linux Mark Institute:

"Linux founder Linus Torvalds is defending protection of the Linux trademark and insists that sublicensing is a loss-making operation.
Last month, a lawyer acting on behalf of Torvalds, wrote to 90 companies in Australia and asked them to relinquish any legal claim to the name Linux and to purchase a license from the Linux Mark Institute, a nonprofit organization that is the licensee for the Linux trademark.

... Companies will need to pay between $200 and $5,000 to sublicense the Linux trademark, which led some in the open-source community to accuse Torvalds of cashing in on the success of Linux...

"Not only do I not get a cent of the trademark money, but even (the Linux Mark Institute, which actually administers the trademark) has so far historically always lost money on it," Torvalds said in a posting to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. "

If it's not cost-effective for Linux to administer their trademark, it sure isn't going to be for Arduino. It is a sad fact of international copyright law that trademark and copyright enforcement is for people with money. You do not ofter (ever?) see cases of ordinary people going to court over their trademarks or copyright: it is always a corporation, a publisher or someone with money to burn.

Seen in this light the Arduino trademark is unenforceable. I can't imagine that you have 20K sitting around per year for enforcing it. I also can't imagine that you'd want to spend any time doing that! It's counter to what the project is about. So why not just let it be free :slight_smile:

Daniel

And if you can't enforce your trademark, you don't have one, so why not just let it be free :slight_smile:

Linus thinks its a good idea or he would have released the trademark. Its his trademark so he can do what he wants.
Just like Arduino team owns the copyrights to all the code and PCB layouts which they have licensed under CC.
Whether not they will use a lawyer to enforce those legal rights is, well, none of our business.

Anyways, Arduino team also doesn't have the fiscal capability to take someone to court if they break the CC license, either. Does that mean they should just release it all into the public domain and "get rid" of that responsibility?

limor

the simple legal fact is that if you can't enforce it through demand letters and legal action etc, you give up your legal claim to the "mark" by the fact of non-enforcement.

You can't keep the mark and not enforce it: trademark law doesn't work that way.

The Arduino foundation can't afford to enforce it. So, at the risk of sounding like a parrot, why not....

D

the simple legal fact is that if you can't enforce it through demand letters and legal action etc, you give up your legal claim to the "mark" by the fact of non-enforcement.

You can't keep the mark and not enforce it: trademark law doesn't work that way.

They can enforce it by sending boilerplate C&D emails, which cost nothing. Maybe they'll represent themselves in court. Maybe the EFF will volunteer, or they have lawyer friends. Maybe they'll blow all the money they earned selling arduinos on some hotshot lawyer.

Most people who trademark aren't planning to go to court. That doesn't mean they shouldn't register the trademark: most violators stop when they get a C&D.

According to the interwebs, Linus -didnt- register the word originally and then regretted it when it was snapped up by some jackass.
I'd rather Arduino team trademarks the word than some other person. :slight_smile:

limor

ps. I think I've said everything worth saying, and more. Since you don't agree, it's probably not worth wasting your time on this, so I wont post about it anymore.

yes no doubt some very limited enforcement action is possible, although I seriously doubt the foundation's resources would go much further than a demand letter. If it goes to court, that takes a year to resolve or more, and tens of thousands of dollars or volunteer time. For jurisdiction. Do it again for once for the US, ok, but again for China, and again for Singapore, and again for France? And again in the USA if someone else tries it? I guess by that point you have the emails of your volunteer lawyers all set up. Also, for places like China, you need to actually go through the registration process in order to be able to prosecute someone for infringement, so add a few thousand per country like that, or a few dozen hours of volunteer time, and maybe a few thousand for the Chinese-English or Italian translation.
Volunteer lawyers are also not known for their expertise in interantional trademark litigation! :slight_smile:

It's a full time job enforcing a trademark internationally.

But really, is that what the whole Arduino thing is about?

If you compare trademark enforcement of the Arduino name with just letting poeple use it, the latter is a lot more consistent with the philosophy of open-source hardware development.

D

Hi, can you please clarify what you mean by "don't publish full CAD files"?

I was talking about the alternate layouts for "bare bones" functionality that you've been showing the hardware forums. In retrospect, this wasn't fair at all since they are still in the pre-product stage, and I apologize.

BillW

About that trademark issue...
If you can't enforce the trademark better give up on it anyway?
Sounds like a strange idea to me. Even if legal steps are not affordable, I would never give away the chance to
at least point a finger at "EvilArduino" on the net, in the press. whatever...

What do I expect as a consumer from the "Arduino" trademark?
I bought 3 of them until now, they all worked fine. I don't have any need for any more of the boards right now, but
when I need a few more of them I expect them to be of the same quality next year.
Ok, now it's next year... I order 10 boards from my local distributor (not PCB-Europe) but he switched to "ElCheapoArduino" in the meantime. Bad news is they do not work as expected. I complain with my distributor but he says :
"you clicked on : buy arduino now, and we delivered arduino! Well, it's not trademarked it is an arduino"
I would argue: If I order an arduino somewhere, I want that same good quality board I have now.

Imagine I release a new Beatles CD and put some fake pictures of John,Paul,George and Ringo (I know there are only two of them left) on the cover. But when you start up the player your only hear me strumming away on the guitar and singing along with a voice that makes my dog change into another room!
I guess you would prefer that I had to call my CD "Eberhard Fahle sings his favourite Beatles tunes". Then you would hear this strange Free Jazz version of "Let it be Arduino" on the college radio and think : Not bad, actually even better than the original, I'll buy it.

Name on derative work
I went through this when I released my first open source software. I was tempted to use a license that actally forbids to mention the original source or promote the deriative work with my name. I skipped that since I wanted a licence that was really easy to understand and since nobody knows me. There are no credits to be lost for Eberhard Fahle.
But the concern is still there: somebody probably puts out a bad piece of software and it has your name on it. Still make me feel unconfortable.
For the Arduino there is a lot of credibility to loose. If I had to decide for this project I would vote for putting the non-advertising clause into effect.

OT
The thread has reached page 4, probably someone should mention again that ..

  1. Open source hardware is a fairly new topic. Try searching the net, read the wikipedia article
    Open-source hardware - Wikipedia -> "Look ma, it's that Arduino again!"
    There are no standards here, The Arduino Team might be setting one....
  2. We all love the arduino and appreciate the work being done
  3. Find it very pleasing that mellis is still with the discussion!
  4. Don't expect a quick answer to the whole thing, don't we?

Eberhard

hey

regarding the "poeple will make bad quality clones" argument that gets tossed around: we're not talking about a swiss watch or a particle accelerator here.

The Aruduino is about 10$ worth of very simple components: a few LED's two IC's, a regulator, five or six capacitors, a half-dozen resistors and a bunch of connectors. Heck, half of us who post regularly in the forum have built our own reliable "homebrewed" versions, so why on earth would there be cause to think that a manufacturer could not put a reliable one of these together? It's a very simple job for any manufacturer with a basic level of experience. There is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in the design. I thought, after all, that its simplicity was part of its "design for proliferation". And if the fear is Chinese/Taiwanese/Korean manufacturers doing shoddy work, well that would actually mean quality, because they know what they're doing, as they're already manufacturing and assembling more than half of the electronic devices made in the world. An educated guess would say that most of the Arduino's electronic components could also be traced to China. It's where most electronic parts get made these days.

Yeah, so I really don't get the quality issue, can someone explain it to me, perhaps with a concrete example?

D

PS Eberhard: you shouldn't expect much as consumer, as it's not a consumer product. It's an open-source hardware project. Maybe that's the essence of the problem: people are confusing it for a product, with brand name and all.

Except for a handful of shoddy LED's, everything else I've imported from China has been of impeccable quality. Recently I purchased 200 1.6mH 4x4" coils made to specification, at a cost of 40 cents each, the workmanship was incredible. I also imported 2 brand new 125khz RFID readers, with enclosures, for $10 each - they do the same job as the phidget readers, and how much are they? Same with ethernet cams, 50 bucks each and functionally flawless.

So I don't think there's a legitimate argument regarding the quality of electronics components originating in China. Once upon a long time ago, there were many examples of bad workmanship originating in China, but, things there have changed, a lot. So much so, I'd be prepared to wager that the quality of a copy, given the right instructions, would be difficult spotting any considerable differences.

I struggle though, to understand why someone would want to manufacture their own. When you factor in shipping, the time it takes to organize the purchase, possible communications issues resulting in unforeseen misunderstandings, the anticipated savings might not completely transpire.

I've wondered for a while, why there aren't more 3rd party add-on boards specifically designed for the Arduino. Like, relay boards, LED multiplexers, input multiplexers, so that a few of the solutions people seek in the Arduino, are available off-the-shelf, packaged with software and examples.

I mean, how many people buy an Arduino, then try for months trying to get a LED to blink? Perhaps not that extreme, but if you read through the forum, I've noticed quite a number of people looking for ways to control large numbers of LED's - surely that's screaming out for an off-the-shelf solution, so why not get that made in China?

Legally, I also think the good people here would be seriously challenged enforcing the trademark. Recently, an acquaintance and I were discussing a (not very exciting) new technology, he suggested that, unless we had piles of millions of dollars, the best way to protect the technology was to ensure it was available at the lowest possible price and mass distributed before anyone had the chance to think about copying it. He suggested, that was a means of making the millions needed, to then afford to protect the technology. Otherwise, a company with deeper pockets, would simply beat you to death until your funds had run out.

And the other question remains, is the Trademark legally enforceable? It could take 5 years in a court to get a ruling on just that one point. And by then, how many millions has someone else made?

Anyway, if it's a case of opportunities to profit, I think there's plenty of others besides building copies. But, I would be interested in understanding why it is an issue, over the savings of a few dollars?

And as for making copies, I suggest anyone with that kind of determination better have their sights set on making millions in order to defend against any kind litigation - who really knows how deep the pockets are of those defending the trademark.

Why would someone make an arduino clone? Maybe its sick but because its fun?! I cant speak for limor or the others here who have done so but I genuinely enjoy the attempt to 'build a better mousetrap'. Often my 'clones' really are just for specific pieces Im working on. And Im cool with the idea that I can pretty much do as I please for personal use. But with the current state of ambiguity in the licensing, I really dont know what could happen if I sold a work that used an arduino setup that I made, since I would then be making commercial gain in a sense. Now yeah its not like Im going to get rich making my little arduino ripoffs but all the same these are the types of issues that need to be addressed as the Arduino grows.

I also agree that chinese manufacturing, as long as youre not Hasbro, is superb. But I guarantee with a market share of 10k I doubt any manufacturer is looking to cash in. The arduino serves a niche segment of a niche market. Even if we, the community, are capable of converting half the bs2 users thats still not a terribly huge market all things considered. My point is there is no reason a chinese manuf, or someone acting on their behalf, would have for mass producing the Arduino. Besides the hardware has been too liquid with an update to the board way to often for hugely mass produced run.

Finally, I agree the whole trademark thing really means you have to have the money to enforce it. CC licenses really imply a certain amount of honesty amongst those making derivative works. Like hell I would really be able to enforce my CC work. Beyond that to have certain things TM means the owner is going to enforce it otherwise it is really worth nothing. If you cant enforce it why bother with TM and just leave it open.... take the high road so to speak. Now if the Arduino foundation plans on enforcement, well thats another thing...

BTW, I think this is a good healthy debate... a sign that shows how involved this community is and ultimately how much we care about this. I hope it also illustrates some of the varied concerns that we as users have.

Brian

So I don't think there's a legitimate argument regarding the quality of electronics components originating in China...

Did I miss something?
When I mentioned that I support the idea of local production (for me thats europe) of the arduino, I was not questioning the quality of the components, but was concerned about the working conditions.
I far as I know PCB are still made with some agressive chemicals put on copper, which will end up as toxic waste to be handled with gloves at least. The Yangtse-river is already dead and if you want to spoil your day go to www.amnesty.org and search for "china working conditions".
I don't want to discuss this any further as it is irrelevant to the topic.

Any american or european would be perfectly able to to produce an Arduino-board which is not working!
I could do it, trust me :wink:
I simply don't understand why these people should be allowed to ride the ArdunioWave by using the trademark?
If you think the board needs some competion in any way, just go ahead and make one. This is not as Daniel said the flux capacitor. Call the whole thing TPFKAA (TheProjectFormerlyKnownAsArduino) and good luck.

I still don't know what the world is missing when the Arduino team is not putting out the production files.
Anybody thought about requesting open sourcing the financial issues of the project?
Where are the calcualtions and the manufacturer contact lists for the components on the board, I thought this was open source???
(Got carried away here I think...)

Eberhard: you shouldn't expect much as consumer, as it's not a consumer product. It's an open-source hardware project. Maybe that's the essence of the problem: people are confusing it for a product, with brand name and all.

No, I am a customer when it comes to the Arduino hardware. I paid money for the board, so expect it to be working otherwise, I will return it.
The (open source minded) manufacturer of the board has also put in his investment and needs to sell the board to me.
This is clearly a producer/customer relationship.
It is totally different from open source software I use. When some part of the software is not up to my requirements I can (hopefully) fix that myself with an editor and a compiler.
This would not be the case if a trace on a Arduino PCB somehow ended up in the wrong place and stopped the whole thing from working.

Eberhard