Qualcomm Arduino license changes

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Scarlet4eyedCuda

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I've read a few posts on other platforms stating that Qualcomm has/is updating their license terms and it is not open source friendly. Here is a link to a reddit post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1p210nl

I don't pretend to understand legal stuff so I'll just ask. Is Teensy affected by this? Does this change the recommended way we program out Teensy boards (no more Arduino IDE)? If so what will be the new recommended programming method?

I figured this would happen, that is why I decided to take a step back with my current project and move from an Arduino Mega to the Teensy 4.1. I have to do more work as the Teensy Analog is not 5v tolerant so that is a bummer, but I'm willing to go through the hoops to dump Qualcomm's deep pockets and to keep their hands out of my pockets...

Thanks...
 
Arduino IDE is still open source. They're saying "Our 20-year commitment to open-source is unwavering".

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The Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight | Arduino Blog

We’ve heard some questions and concerns following our recent Terms of Service and Privacy Policy updates. We are thankful our community cares enough to engage with us and we believe transparency and open dialogue are foundational to Arduino. Let us be absolutely clear: we have been open-source...
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I believe Arduino is being truthful in this statement.

One man speaking with the Adafruit social media accounts is saying otherwise. At least to my eyes, it looks like fearmongering over boilerplate legalese. Thing is, there's always feeling uncertainty surrounding corporate acquisitions. He might believe he's somehow doing good by warning people of potential future problems, but the tone and timing really looks like a malicious effort to inflict harm on Arduino's reputation, taking advantage of those natural feelings of uncertainty everyone has.

I'm keeping an open mind about Arduino's future with Qualcomm. I think you should too.

If things do go badly with Qualcomm, we'll adapt one way or another and Teensy will continue. I'm not going to speculate on the details, because I'm pretty sure the most likely future is Arduino IDE remains open source and Arduino's long-established policies about allowing 3rd party packages will continue.
 
The license on the Arduino IDE seems very explicit:

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0​

Permissions of this strongest copyleft license are conditioned on making available complete source code of licensed works and modifications, which include larger works using a licensed work, under the same license. Copyright and license notices must be preserved. Contributors provide an express grant of patent rights. When a modified version is used to provide a service over a network, the complete source code of the modified version must be made available.
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Thank you. I agree that the GPL v3.0 is in place. It just seemed a bit odd that someone from a company like Adafruit would come out and say this without some strong background, thus the question.
 
It does indeed feel odd seeing this coming from Adafruit's main social media accounts. Usually companies of their size tend to be more careful about public statements.

Adafruit does have history with Arduino, which may or may not be a factor. In 2015, Adafruit was manufacturing brand name Arduino Uno. Immediately after that arrangement abruptly ended, Adafruit launched a product line of essentially Arduino clone boards named "Metro".

I'm sure the man making these statements feels he's doing the right thing, but absent any tangible behavior from Arduino beyond boilerplate legalese, at least for me it's difficult to image this drama is based on solely good intention.
 
I get red flags when someone (anyone) comments that “oh, don’t worry about that, that’s just boilerplate.” Case in point: look at what CRC Press did to MathWorld and Eric Weinstein. It’s one of the reasons I don’t buy new CRC Press books.
 
I think it's OK to say "this new phasing worries me." Sure, it might be worrisome. But, at this point, all we need to do is slightly worry. Maybe it's something to keep in the back of your mind, but nothing actually bad has happened at this point. I'd be more worried if they had actually taken negative steps of some tangible sort. But, they haven't. They've slapped legal boilerplate onto things but until they actively act on it, it's just speculation. And, if they do act on it, there are alternatives. PlatformIO exists, the existing Arduino ecosystem can be cloned. There's off ramps if it were to go south but let's worry about that if it comes to it. There is basically no way for Qualcomm to actually kill Arduino. You just can't do that to open source software and hardware. Someone will fork it and keep going.
 
Arduino IDE is really clumsy to work with. Much better experience, faster builds, better usability is offered by Platformio. Maybe PJRC might show more interest/support for Platformio , considering the recent developments?
 
PaulStoffregen said:
I'm keeping an open mind about Arduino's future with Qualcomm. I think you should too.

If things do go badly with Qualcomm, we'll adapt one way or another and Teensy will continue. I'm not going to speculate on the details, because I'm pretty sure the most likely future is Arduino IDE remains open source and Arduino's long-established policies about allowing 3rd party packages will continue.
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I agree.

In particular, the T&C only concerns the arduino.cc website and related services, not the software — which even I missed on the first read —, and the licenses governing the software (AGPL for the IDE, GPL for the cli tools) have not been modified at all. Considering the number of contributors and inheritance of the 2.0 IDE, I do not believe they will bother doing a full rewrite that would be required for changing the licensing (in any user-impactful manner, i.e. to a non-open-source license).

I am slightly more pessimistic in the sense that I do recommend keeping an eye on the related software licenses even moreso than before. Before, we knew that the ecosystem was maintained by a company that knew that going afoul of free/open source principles would kill it. Qualcomm is, uh, complicated; it is one of those companies that does not understand open source, but at least it isn't as openly hostile as e.g. Broadcom is. And like even Microsoft shows, a company can change its stance in a decade or two — MS was quite hostile to F/OSS around the turn of the century.

PaulStoffregen said:
I'm sure the man making these statements feels he's doing the right thing, but absent any tangible behavior from Arduino beyond boilerplate legalese, at least for me it's difficult to image this drama is based on solely good intention.
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Or, perhaps they're just more suspicious by nature, perhaps having had some personal project fail/be hurt because of Qualcomm?

(I'm specifically referring to WiFi routers, where Qualcomm SoCs like IPQ6000 series often use a blob-like OpenWRT derivative, without any help in including the chipset support in upstream OpenWRT. They take, but never reciprocate, just doing the minimum their lawyers say. It is very easy to look at Qualcomm doing the same to the Arduino ecosystem that they do to OpenWRT, taking and using it while staying minimally compatible with the license requirements (I'm not sure anyone has been able to recompile the firmware from the GPL dump you can obtain from the router manufacturer under GPL), essentially screwing over all the end-user-developers who'd like to control the hardware themselves, rather than leaving the control to the manufacturer.)

Granted, this is just speculation on my own part, reflecting my own reasons why I am suspicious of Qualcomm. I do not know whether the man referred to has had anything to do with OpenWRT or Qualcomm before.
 
shawn said:
libraries in the Arduino library manager
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Don't they 'just' pull directly from GitHub - as linked in the library.properties?
Github owns storage and manipulation of the files (like any Cloud provider), arduino just links and copies, so would be out of their lane to ask for anything more.
 
defragster said:
Don't they 'just' pull directly from GitHub - as linked in the library.properties?
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Yes, my thought on this too, you're really publishing on GitHub.

When Arduino made the library manager several years ago, they heard strong feedback from the community (my voice was in that group of many) who didn't want to see Arduino hosting and effectively in full control over 3rd party code. They listened and built a system which pulls from GitHub and other code hosting systems.
 
I'm referring to this text:
non-exclusive, royalty free, transferable, sub-licensable, perpetual, irrevocable, to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law … right to use the Content published and/or updated on the Platform as well as to distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish and make publicly visible all material, including software, libraries, text contents, images, videos, comments, text, audio, software, libraries, or other data (collectively, “Content”) that User publishes, uploads, or otherwise makes available to Arduino throughout the world using any means and for any purpose, including the use of any username or nickname specified in relation to the Content.
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Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...ries-hobbyists-ahead-of-qualcomm-acquisition/

In order to include one's library in the Library Manager, you need to submit a URL to Arduino at https://github.com/arduino/library-registry, so perhaps this falls under that terms-of-service text. I bolded "libraries" in the quote.
 
Isn't this essentially the reality of publishing software as open source? Your open source license give everyone the right to use it, copy, modify, etc.

Perhaps this T&C stuff is redundant if your code is open source. But I can see Arduino's point of view (or the concern of the lawyer(s) they've hired) that some content might not have clearly stated open source license. Lawyers are paid to think of what happens the bad case scenario, like where someone behaves dishonorably after using Arduino's site to share their library.

What happens if a library author later claims Arduino didn't have rights to publish their code? My guess is Arduino wants to be certain, without having to carefully check every library's license file, they have the right to publish your library to the world.

Or what happens if a library becomes popular and the author later wants to charge people? My guess is words like "transferable, sub-licensable, perpetual, irrevocable" are meant to protect everyone who later uses the library in their projects this sort of scenario where an author later decides to change the terms and require payment.

Of course I could be wrong. Maybe there's some nefarious purpose lurking in this legalese. But I just don't see it.
 
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@ptillish on Arduino forum had some good posts about this on similar thread
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Adafruit’s linkedIn comment on Arduino’s acquisition ?

If this is something you are concerned about, I recommend you take the time to actually research the subject for yourself. Here is the previous version of the Privacy Policy: https://web.archive.org/web/20251012061303/https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/ and here the Terms of Service...
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