Product, not platform?

Is this not just drawing a line under Arduino in its current form, thereby giving it a "sell buy date", rather than keeping it as an ongoing organically developing platform driven by the users?

I just personally feel this decision is a little counterproductive to any true open source project, and will result in a fragmentation of what is at it core the best thing about Arduino, its open development making it product, not platform.

I think of it more as a chance to have a serious, wide-ranging discussion about what needs changing or tweaking in the current implementation. That is, rather than an end to the process of evolving the platform, it's an opportunity to be explicit about making sure that improvements do happen. There will continue to be post-1.0 releases and improvements.

But how is that different to how thing are now?

What wrong with open-source projects being in a permeant alfa state of development, surly this rhetoric about alfa/beta by it very nature is more about commercial aspirations then development.

I guess it gives us a good chance to clean things up, break backwards compatibility slightly, etc. in a way that makes it clearer to users when the changes happen. It's a bit like Python 3000 (3.0) - giving a round number / name to something to indicate that it's a bit different than what came before.

For us, this could mean things like changing the file extension for sketches, or making Serial.print(byte) output ASCII digits instead of a single byte, or that sort of thing.

From my point of view 1.0 means stabilisation.

i.e. we try to figure out how to remove all the major issue in the current version of Arduino and stabilise the API.

It allows us to have a stable API, a stable documentation and a predictable user experience on the IDE.

This is great news if you're trying to teach a class or write a book etc etc

After this is done we can resume making all the changes and being even more daring in the features we add because there is a stable version that work for most of the people and a more "cutting edge" version with more experimental/advanced API.

m