Qualcomm just bought Arduino

Community General Discussion
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I am seeing an announcement that Qualcomm has bought Arduino!

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Hmm. A Good Thing? Thoughts?

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Since the two topics were on the same subject, I merged them in order to consolidate the discussion in a single place.

Carry on.

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Is this a good thing, in your opinion? I have no opinion on it because I don't know what that means for Arduino

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Hard to say at this point, but the new UNO Q board is very impressive. The boys at Pi could be in trouble now.

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I'm sure it's a good thing for the founders. Banzi especially.

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A post was split to a new topic: Unable to order UNO Q

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Holy smokes. So, my Uno R4 wifi is basically obsolete now?

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Well, never be ashamed to earn a living I always say...

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Not at all, the new board is significantly different. Think of it as a Raspberry Pi married to an UNO.
Remember, the electronics business is constantly evolving and parts become old very fast.

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Absolutely!

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I wonder if compatibility with aging shield designs was worth keeping that bizarre pin spacing. I'm sure there was a discussion about it.

They love it so much they have custom headers.

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Reminds me of an Nvidia Shield or similar.

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I’d like to think this isn’t the beginning of the enshittification of Arduino but giant companies always try to squeeze as much profit as they can from any acquisition. So I’m expecting this means price increases and a subscription model for the dev environment.

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Can you tell me more, I am unaware of the issue.

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If so, I'm out. This is just one of my hobbies. I mean, I already tried the Arduino subscription thing for a year and it wasn't what i hope for, so I'm out on that one anyway

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Even if they tried, there is more than one FREE dev environment.

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Hi @BernieW65.

Only time will prove you right or wrong. However, if you take a look at the UNO Q, which is the first hardware product to come from this change, I think you will agree that it is quite reasonably priced for what it is.

I'm not sure what you mean by "dev environment".

If you mean Arduino IDE, it is free open source software. This software has been given as a gift to all of humanity in perpetuity. If the Arduino company did transition to some form of subscription-based model in relation to Arduino IDE, the community would always have the option of continuing to use the version of the IDE from before that change, or to fork the software and make a version with the subscription-based aspects removed.

The same applies to the open source Arduino CLI tool.

If you mean the new Arduino App Lab, it is also open source software:

https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q#:~:text=Is%20Arduino%20App%20Lab%20open%20source%3F

Is Arduino App Lab open source?

Yes, App Lab and the App Bricks library are open source; we are working to publish corresponding source code repositories, they will become available soon.

Even though the GitHub repositories haven't yet been made public, the App Lab source code is already released under the GPL 3.0 license and is available for download from the link on the Software page:

https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/#app-lab-section

As for Arduino Cloud, it is true that it is a subscription service. However, that has been the case for years. There is a free plan.

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Arduino subscription? Do you mean the cloud? Why would you expect it to be free given there is a lot of cost and no other source of offsetting revenue. It is quite cheap.