Which is the future for all .org's boards that have been reincorporated to .cc's stock (Leonardo, Esplora, Robot, many shields...)? Can we sure they won't be deprecated again? It's very surprising to see the Wifi shield near the Wifi 101 shield,or the Ethernet shield near the Ethernet2 shield, and so on. All is a mess
On the other hand, what's going on with (new, refreshed, clean) Genuino brand?
Now that everything Arduino is kiss-and-make-up I notice that IDE 1.8.0 is available from both Arduino.cc and Arduino.org with support for both brands of Arduino. The final settlement has not been announced yet but it looks like Arduino is now available worldwide.
I suspect the Italian factory has the tooling in place for all the Arduino.org products and some other factories produce the Arduino.cc products. Which factory is used is probably just a matter of tariffs and shipping costs because, after all, Arduino is a business. Maybe they will change silkscreening or shade of blue but that is a minor detail. I don't know what they plan to do with the Genuino brand, but that's just a matter of what is silkscreened on the board and printed on the box. They all have the same heart.
Yes, thanks...but...in reality I'm not interested on their inner bussiness. I only want to have some customer "security". For instance:
*How can we be sure boards which were deprecated due to several reasons won't be deprecated again (Due, Leonardo, Yún, Esplora, etc) and the same for shields (GSM, USB Host, etc, etc -please, remove these very outdated and space-wasting Tinkerkit connectors from Motor shield!-, the LCD, etc, etc)?
*How can be sure the level of software support will be correct (for instance, what's going on with Wifi/Wifi 101 shield libraries?; what's going on with outdated USB Host library and some more?, what's going on with Yun system?...) Even Arduino Ethernet 2 now hasn't a decent library, and so on.
Customer certainty is more likely from a strong thriving supplier. Though Arduino has been around for a decade the split between the two entities had created quite some doubt. Now that it is settled we can look to the past for a guide to the future.
The Arduino IDE and libraries still support the earlier boards, even as the chip industry is moving from AVR into SAM chips. Industry progress has rendered some parts obsolete, e.g. WiFi -> WiFi101, and the industry trend is that newer parts cost less and do more. This leads to eventual non-availability. Think about trying to get brand new OEM parts for a 25 year old American car.
My crystal ball only seems to work in reverse and I don't know what the future will be. However, the primary mission of Arduino is education and the solder-it-yourself Arduino Uno is still going strong. The open source nature of Arduino seems to signal that you can build your own boards and use a compatible version of the Arduino libraries. There are newer products from Arduino -- the MKR series of boards with more compute power and a lower price -- and these signal to me that Arduino is still a leading brand.
As far as support, the large Arduino community is outstanding and it is still free!
*How can we be sure boards which were deprecated due to several reasons won't be deprecated again
*How can be sure the level of software support will be correct
You can never be "sure" of these things for ANY product.
IMO, things are better now than they were before the "reincorporation."
What saddens me is that I thought Genuino was a brave new beginning to clarify and sharpen future directions but now (I think) there are many stuff around. If I belonged to the A.T crowd, I'd do a lot of cleaning.