What is going on at Arduino ?

Community General Discussion
1

What is happening ? My reseller (officially listed) had to buy through .org while the 2 Arduino's where fighting, he ist finally listed official Arduino.cc reseller, but can't couldn't get any products since the announcement, and he doesn't know why, Arduino doesn't respond to him; he's been selling and promoting Arduino for years as well as training lots of kids on Arduino, and tells me he's just sorry he can't deliver any products, just doesn't get any news from Arduino. What's going on ? Is Arduino going out of business ? Please communicate on what's going on, not just some marketing communication about a 'New Era', that is a lack of respect for those who always supported you :angry:

Any statement from Arduino guys ?

2

You should be aware that the official Arduino folk hardly ever participate in this Forum (regrettably). The regular contributors (like me) are just hobbyists who try to help other people with their Arduino projects.

Apart from that you have provided no details about what part of the world you live in or who is the supplier that is having a problem. Maybe another Arduino user from your area has some information.

...R

3

Hi.

I've been around here for some 5 years now, buying Arduino stuff, using this forum as a source of information and helping people out too whenever i think i can (not always successful).
I've been around on other forums too and have seen some threads that might raise an eyebrow or two.

So that was a very brief introduction of myself, looking forward to yours.

This forum is, as forums go, for and from Arduino users.
Every now and then some (usually new) users come over here and spew their bile about anything Arduino related, but way out of this forum's reach.
Your post is a perfect example of it.

Regular users over here get used to this, and throw this in the bin as were it spam.
So now you're not only some disgruntled user, you're also right next to a spammer.
Hint: that doesn't help your case.

Don't expect much of a reaction from 'Arduino guys' to this thread, it's very unlikely to be even seen by those guys you are addressing.

Try to understand that the '.org guy' is the one that started the mess with his 'coup d'état'.
He is the one that forced your reseller to buy from him, scamming his way through trademarks and lawsuits.
Only recently prove of this person's scams was made public, starting with his claims to doctorate degrees from institutes which were never attended by him.

Now the 'Arduino guys' you are addressing, are trying to untangle his mess.
I'm sure you understand that costs lots of time and other resources.
Resources which are unlikely to be found with those 'Arduino guys', because this was never what they had in mind when starting the Arduino endeavour.
If they would have kept an eye on anything developing this way, they might have been able to prevent it from happening.
But then again, that would have meant higher costs for Arduino products (about twice the cost today i'd say), because an army of lawyers needed for this will make sure they get very well paid.

All this doesn't help you nor your reseller.
But perhaps the both of you can try to understand that things are a mess and need to be untangled.
This has nothing to do with 'disrespect for those who always supported you', as they may have supported the other guy but not this community.
Unknowingly and with all the best intentions for sure.
But that is how things are and which means it will be hard to not have problems while trying to get everything going the way anybody really would want it to be.

4

While I don't think it likely that this thread will result in anything but speculation, I think it's a reasonable topic to discuss here.

@snebor could have just said "screw it, I'll just buy a Chinese clone" but they wanted to buy official products bad enough to post about it here.

The Arduino project will carry on regardless of fortunes of the Arduino company because we have an extremely strong community and the majority of the assets are open source. However, as things currently stand, the Arduino organization is the primary gatekeeper of our most significant assets: The IDE, forum, documentation, official libraries, Playground, AVR, SAM, SAMD hardware packages. While it's possible for anyone to contribute to these assets, pull requests sit and rot if the Arduino organization doesn't pay the salaries of the developers who need to review then and click the "merge" button. Bug reports don't do good without someone to investigate and fix them. The website, forum, Playground, Library Manager, Arduino Web Editor, Arduino Create Hub, download server, etc. all disappear as soon as the hosting fees aren't paid. And of course significant development on all these things has been driven by the Arduino employees.

Where does that money come from? Sales of official Arduino projects.

So it's very much of concern to the entire community how Arduino runs their business. Unfortunately there's not much we can do about this other than encouraging people to buy official products and donate. If Arduino doesn't run their business effectively enough to manage to make those products available to the customers then it hurts us all.

It's frustrating to me when I see this happen, and I have had the same feeling about not noticing much happen after these "New Era" type of announcements, but some of this stuff does take a lot of work. If you look at the big picture, progress is definitely happening, even if more slowly than we might like.

Although an official response is unlikely, every once in a while someone official does drop in on these threads. Massimo Banzi tends to pop up when (and only when) someone starts talking smack.

5

In the grand scheme of things the "re merger" of CC/ORG will take a lot longer than the separation.

Just the logistics of staff is one thing that could take months.
Then there is the manufacturing to re sort out which again could take a while.
Then each department will have to re-organise.

The list of problems is pretty big and there will be no overnight fix for any of it.
Right now people are working hard to get the domains sorted out and that itself is not an easy task.

There will probably be a "tail off" period for sales where prior orders are sorted out per CC / ORG basis.

Imagine trying to make sense of two very different jigsaws that have to be made into a single one despite different shapes and pictures.