P18F4550:
i have bought an official duemilanove and many official shields, i have also bought a cheap Mega board from china because at the time that is what my budget allowed, but i stll support the Arduino effort and comment on this forum
This is all the Arduino team is trying to support.
There are some people that have sold knockoffs with cheap parts as Offfical, which means as a user its a crap shoot on quality.
The Identifier just adds one more sticker basically to the made in italy sticker but this time its in hardware in the 8u2 chip.
Some are afraid of losing what they have, so they are (needlessly) panicking thinking this means closing the door of openness.
Some of the people think that because the chip COULD be used to lock people out that it will be and they think that because it is what THEY would do.
There are also the ones who are afraid its going to happen because they have seen other capitalist mechanisms of protectionisms ( dating back even hundreds of years ) and afraid its going to happen here.
And there are even others who's reaction are like my first gut response, well it was good while it lasted, there goes a great thing to greed.
But none of the concerns are on the mark, including my first knee jerk feeling, The UNO is even more open then previous Arduinos
The additions really are MORE OPEN, the FTDI chip that they replaced is a black box chip, no control of whats inside, the 8u2 is programmable and the LUFA (Lightweight USB Framework for AVRs) is open source and fully programmable for expanded project support.
So while I realize Internet time is very fast, and thats alot of what is happening in the chicken little syndrome, in real world time the Arduino just made its next step and is better and more open than ever before.
BOZ
www.musheen.com