I have a question just a simple one. If you design a product and is based around an arduino. Can you still call your product an Arduino product?
Joseph
That really depends on who you are talking to.
And, I would think, a clarification of "is based around". For example,
is it a shield for a particular Arduino board?
is it a copy of an Arduino product, with or without significant enhancements/extensions?
???
Hey @Paul_KD7HB thank you. That is what I was thinking too. A friend of Mine build an open source product that is based around an arduino board with arduino code. But it got me thinking. Can you really include or say that arduino is inside like what intel says it has intel inside.
@camsysca exactly. It got me thinking. My friend made something that has an arduino board in it and build other stuff around it.
Depends on how successful you are. If it becomes well known expect a visit from the Arduino trademark lawyers to discuss payment or removal of the reference.
This website about how to use the Arduino trademark should tell you everything you need to know.
If you want to own your software, take care which libraries you include and any code that you might 'lift'. If it will be Open then use what's Open.
That also applies to software you might copy from somewhere. It just might be copyrighted and you missed seeing that, or ignored it.
@Paul_KD7HB You are right. It just got me curious about some of the things that are out there people try to put out there saying it's got Arduino inside.
@GoForSmoke Of course. I was just watching a video of a kick starter someone invented something and it had the phrases arduino inside. Got me thinking what is going on.
Oh I understand about trademarks. I was watching a video about a kickstarter a guy said he invented something and he put in there arduino inside he said. I was wondering why he would said that for.
@oldcurmudgeon Very true.
The marketing advantage I would see from advertising that there is an Arduino board inside a product would be that prospective customers who care about repairability might like the fact that they could easily replace an important component of the product if it should be damaged. However, I'm not sure prospective customers of the average consumer electronic device have the idea of the brains of the product burning out top of mind. So I'm not sure this would be a big selling point. If the use of the board results in a higher cost of the product, I suspect that would more than outweigh any benefit that comes from the prospects of improved repairability from a marketing perspective.
I think there could be a much more significant marketing advantage from being able to say that a product is "Arduino compatible". By this, I mean the ability to easily replace the firmware on the device with an Arduino sketch uploaded via Arduino IDE. This characteristic of easy "hackability" is not something of interest to the average consumer, but is far more so to the maker/hobbyist market specifically. So if you have a product targeting that market then this could indeed be a big selling point. I know I would pay more for such a product than a non-"hackable" equivalent.
This ties in well with the potential of marketing a product as "open source". Even if it is only the production firmware that is released under an open source license, this could definitely be a selling point for the maker market. Added points if the source code is in the accessible form of an Arduino sketch.
Note that "Arduino compatible" and "open source" characteristics of a product can be achieved without the need to incorporate an off the shelf Arduino board. It can be accomplished just as well with only a custom PCB designed for the product.
To extend the discussion somewhat beyond marketing and visibility, the practical reality of actually running a business also needs to be considered. If the goal is to reference another well know brand to be associated with its values and capabilities, that likely implies a desire for broader recognition and greater visibility rather than simply serving an immediate functional purpose. Marketing can help with that, but it can only take you so far; at some point, long-term goals, economic viability, and an actual business plan have to come into play.
Building a durable, profitable business around open source software and open hardware is structurally difficult because the core product is often easy to copy, fork, or commoditize. Once your designs and code are public, competitors can reproduce much of the value while undercutting margins, which pushes the original company away from product economics and into services, support, consulting, training, enterprise integrations, or branded ecosystem advantages.
That shift is where things get hard. Services businesses are usually people-intensive and capital-intensive. Revenue often scales more linearly with headcount than software does, margins are typically lower, and growth requires constant investment in sales, support, operations, and talent. Instead of benefiting from pure software-style scalability, you are often running a hybrid model where community goodwill is high but monetization is comparatively constrained.
Open hardware adds another layer of difficulty because physical manufacturing involves inventory, supply chains, quality control, logistics, certification, and thinner margins. If clones appear quickly, the original innovator may bear most of the R&D and community-building costs while others capture cheaper manufacturing profits.
Arduino is a useful example. Despite its enormous brand recognition, educational reach, and ecosystem strength, sustaining growth still required repeated fundraising and strategic restructuring over time. That reflects a broader reality: even highly successful open ecosystems often struggle to translate widespread adoption into dominant financial returns without external capital, premium products, or eventual consolidation.
The core problem is that openness can maximize adoption and influence, but it often weakens defensibility. Unless a company builds strong adjacent advantages—brand, certification, enterprise tooling, cloud services, or proprietary add-ons—it can end up trapped in a difficult economic zone where it is highly influential but financially pressured.
So the real question for me is: “What’s the dream?” Is it to build a small, agile business targeting a semi-local market through custom products, integration, and maintenance services, or to create something large, scalable, and highly defensible? Because those are fundamentally different ambitions.
It's simple.
An Arduino product is a product produced or made by Arduino, the company.
Contains Arduino means a genuine Arduino product incorporated.
Based on Arduino could mean anything.
Think like a marketer, the slightest association becomes license.
In Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels, the Computer HEX is labelled Anthill Inside cause... it has one.
This is a chance to get creative. Don't be a Gates.
The hacking section of the main site directs us to build our own chip-stand-alone 'duinos' as end products. Arduino is a whole system, what you make with that system has Arduino Inside.
Arduino sell boards intended and advertised as building blocks for products ( see industrial , “professional “ products) - so I guess it’s ok to build something around a Arduino board ?
I can’t see why you would want to put “Arduino inside” any way , and that is not allowed :
You could say "Inside, there is an Arduino" but it's not nearly as catchy. 
A Duino Inside