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The bigger issue is what he can do to make his IDE super compelling without potentially needing help from the larger Arduino community. For example, think of the sheer number of libraries whose compatibility has to be tested and verified.

So far, I'd wager that the bulk of the community is still rallied behind Banzi, et al and the forum is the remaining prize that Musto has to claim to get to victory. I wonder if he's gambling to get it once the LLC has been starved of funds and has to shut down.

Curious how the LLC forums continue to be treated like a afterthought, much like the trademark. That lack of focus will surely bite the team in the butt sooner or later. The folks that do the bulk of the work are barely acknowledged and the Arduino team rarely, if ever, makes an appearance there.

The forums could also be organized better and should be the focus of the LLC web site. For example, it would be very helpful for every forum subdivision to start with a list of compatible libraries that help do specific things (like measure sensors, run external ADCs, and so on). The LLC web site has information scattered all over, making searching via Google more productive than manually traversing the site.

If it were up to me (and it clearly isn't) I would focus first and foremost on improving the user experience vs all the eyecandy that is currently the front page. More focus on creating large lists of libraries and example code that make life easier for novices and power users alike. Putting several interns on compiling them, updating them as needed, etc.

How about some videos showing how the system is out together and used? Why is Arduino LLC leaving this to the user community vs doing it themselves? Their website in its current form is all about them vs all about the uses making the product. That narcissism is not only unhealthy, it gives Musto et al the "in" to provide something better.

FWIW, the Teensy site would also benefit from a rethink. Teensy 2 related items are listed under PJRC, while many Teensy 3.x related information can only be found in the forums. I suggest making more of the site centered around a forum format. You'd have to add a few more forum subdivisions but nothing earth shattering.
 
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I believe they are talking about Banzi. Apparently, his student invents Wiring, Banzi convinces him to take it open source, then immediately forks it and builds Arduino around it. Of course, if it's open source, he doesn't have to pay his former student a dime. Ever. That's a little different from cutting him in for a percentage. If Banzi convinces him to go open-source without telling him that he means to immediately fork it and do some for-profit work with it, then he has been duplicitous. If he convinces him to go open-source without any intention to profit by it, but soon decides that he will fork and make a profit by it, and doesn't give that student a cut of the profits, then he has still been duplicitous, because he should reasonably know that the student might make another choice if he knew his own professor was trying to camp his IP for money. (And now he wants to point the finger at Gianluca for not being on the level with him?)

That early history of Wiring I recently learnt about, it does seem unethical persuading a student to relinquish rights and then exploit his work commercially - if that is what happened. No-one really wants to talk details. At the very least there seems to be a conflict of interest.

This is turning into quite a slap fight. I don't see either combatant as being in an ethically superior position.

I think you might be right about that.
 
In UK universities IP is generally owned by the university. In my own experience I've never seen an issue at undergraduate level. I had a PhD student who refused to disclose his 'best' work in his thesis, took out patents at his own expense & is still looking for his shirt...
 
In UK universities IP is generally owned by the university. In my own experience I've never seen an issue at undergraduate level. I had a PhD student who refused to disclose his 'best' work in his thesis, took out patents at his own expense & is still looking for his shirt...

Are you sure? In general, copyright ownership remains with the author. I can't see how a student not being paid by a university would lose that ownership. I thought students paid the university, in which case the student is the employer.

"Work for hire" would generally become the property of the employer. In the case of a sponsored student, the IP details would be specific to the contract. Only in the case of a teaching/research post, as an employee of the university, would I expect IP to automatically belong to the university.

I don't believe there is a simple general rule. e.g.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/current-students/guidelines/intel_prop_rights

Policy Statement on Intellectual Property Rights/Copyright in Relation to students
Preamble

UCL is committed to encouraging the successful exploitation of intellectual property by its staff and students and maximising the value of intellectual property for the benefit of all involved in its creation. UCL seeks to promote the recognition, protection and exploitation of potentially valuable intellectual property produced by its students,

Policy

As a general principle UCL recognises the student as owner of any IPR he/she produces while a registered student of UCL. This principle may be subject to variation in the case of collaborative or externally sponsored work, or other exceptional circumstances.

Collaborative work

Collaboration between students and academic staff and between students and sponsors is subject to the revenue-sharing arrangements detailed in the Financial Regulations (see Annex 2).

(My emphasis)

Does your place have a published IP policy?

In any case, even if it is routine practice for UK universities to assume ownership of student's IP, it does not mean it is legal or indeed moral.

I expect the ownership of undergraduate work is rarely an issue, but I would be quite sure that work undertaken solely by a student not being paid for that work should remain the property of the student.

I think I preferred the days when educational establishments were seen as places of open learning, rather than a "revenue centre" exploiting IP from research paid for by the public, and profits ending up in private hands.
 
Hi Bobc,
You may be right that there is no general rule, and in general copyright does NOT remain with the author. Have you ever published in IEEE for example? I have & THEY own the rights, not me.
Commercial exploitation is another matter. UK universities (IMHO) are becoming very hard nosed about this potential loss of revenue. I think UK law advises that originators of IP are rewarded on 'fair & reasonable' terms in these circumstances.
I'll have a look at our latest IPR policy.
Perhaps Paul could create a new forum area? Politics etc
Cheers
Ian
 
Hi Bobc,
You may be right that there is no general rule, and in general copyright does NOT remain with the author. Have you ever published in IEEE for example? I have & THEY own the rights, not me.
Commercial exploitation is another matter. UK universities (IMHO) are becoming very hard nosed about this potential loss of revenue. I think UK law advises that originators of IP are rewarded on 'fair & reasonable' terms in these circumstances.
I'll have a look at our latest IPR policy.

I recommend you do that, also read some articles about Copyright law, because you are obviously not very familiar with it.

Copyright law quite clearly states copyright remains with the author, unless they agree to transfer rights to a third party. In some countries, you can't even do that.

The reason publishers like IEEE own the rights to your article, is because you agreed to transfer copyright to them. If you don't realise that, you have no business telling people about copyright!

I realise that academics are not lawyers, but it is not hard law to understand. With the recent moves to Open publishing for academic papers, with licenses like CC-BY, some academics have been complaining that they didn't realise that means anyone can publish their articles without them being paid. I suppose that means academics are like everyone else, they enter agreements without reading the small print, and only later realise they have a bad deal.

UK law REQUIRES that Universities respect Copyright and other IP law, like everyone else does! I really dislike your characterisation that being unable to exploit work paid for by the taxpayer is a "loss of revenue". All society benefits from research.
 
Back on topic, new article at hackaday exposing some more of the dirty tricks by Arduino Srl, http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-distributors-were-the-real-arduino/ In the comments someone observed that may be the reason why Adafruit is a bit narky about the situation, if Arduino Srl pulled a fast one on them, while Banzi has told them nothing.

However, if Arduino Srl misrepresented themselves, then any contract is not legally binding and Adafruit can rip it up. Could also be construed as fraudulent. Of course, then Adafruit won't be able to sell any Arduino products, and could end up in court even if the case is bogus.

I've got the feeling there is an experienced shark at work running rings round people who are primarily makers and hackers, and not very business savvy.

But if anyone is swallowing the lies from Arduino Srl and thinking somehow they may not be all to blame in this, well I have a bridge to sell you...
 
Not necessarily. However, the side with more money always has an advantage. In the FRG the loser has to pay the attorneys on both sides of a trial (including criminal suits, so the state can't sue you into the poorhouse like Binney). That keeps frivolous suits down somewhat. In the US, something this sensible is not acceptable, hence the much higher per capita # of attorneys in the US and much higher pay also.

Bottom line is that the legal framework of the business was done so badly that the founders can now look forward to debating it in court. They can only blame themselves.
 
Don't these things always come down to who can outspend who on attorney fees?

Arduino LLC probably has significant revenue coming in from Intel.

While working with 1.6.2, I noticed there's new stuff for Intel's boards. I haven't looked at it... since I've been scrambling to get my Java and build system up to the task, and port my patches over. Fortunately, this time only 3 patches broke, and 2 were minor things. Not bad for such an incredible amount of unexpected new code in this version.

I've got the feeling there is an experienced shark at work running rings round people who are primarily makers and hackers, and not very business savvy.

Yes, indeed.

I had a really bad first impression / feeling about him when Massimo introduced us in person at San Mateo Maker Faire in 2013. That was shortly before Yun was released, when they were still on good terms and working together.

Still, I never imagined he's do all the underhanded stuff he's done recently!
 
Assuming that the major reason for the 1.6.2 release is support of the new hardware, it is understandable that the changes were made in secret if the hardware had not been announced until the 1.6.2 release went out.

One part of my job for the last two employers, has been educating other parts of the corporations I'm working for at the time, of how far back they have to release the ISA, so that GCC/binutils/GDB changes can be checked in to make the release. For example, I was working at AMD, and AMD had a major extension (SSE5) for the processor that was code named bulldozer. We had to carefully plan when to announce the new ISA so that I could get the changes into GCC 4.5 before the feature freeze deadline. GCC 4.5 was needed, because that was going to be the release that the next generation of Red Hat and SLES would use as their base compiler. In the end, I had 1 week to get at least a thousand lines of patches into the tree. I had to have private pre-reviews of the patches from the maintainers to make sure there were no initial problems before the check-in date.

Now, of course the fact that I worked on SSE5 for 9 months, including meeting that insane release window, and it having eventually get yanked out due to AMD switching to AVX, is regrettable. But that is life.

In fact in this last week, I had to have the conversation about a future processor that is being designed right now, that if you want GCC xxx support, you need to have the ISA publicly announced by yyy date, so that it will make the release. And it is complicated by the fact, that we not only have to worry about the schedule for GCC, but now we have to worry about LLVM release dates as well, along with the Linux distributions we work with, what their schedules are.

Sure from an open source perspective it is regrettable that development has to be done behind closed doors before announcement, but my life as a GCC maintainer is to straddle two different worlds.
 
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Arduino LLC probably has significant revenue coming in from Intel.

While working with 1.6.2, I noticed there's new stuff for Intel's boards. I haven't looked at it... since I've been scrambling to get my Java and build system up to the task, and port my patches over. Fortunately, this time only 3 patches broke, and 2 were minor things. Not bad for such an incredible amount of unexpected new code in this version.
I know this may be slightly off topic here, but since you mentioned Intel, I have been trying to do stuff with the Edison as a Trossen Robotics Robot is going to be released with one... (Side story, they are now also going to be supporting RPI2...)

I have been active on their site for awhile and a common complaint has been that they are stuck on Arduino 1.5.3.... Looks like about 10 days ago they released a new version of IDE 1.6.0 (http://www.intel.com/support/edison/sb/CS-035180.htm) I just installed it to see what it is. Have not tried it much yet. But noticed Teensyduino won't install on it ;)

On my Linux machine I installed 1.6.2 Arduino, to see if Intel support was there. So far I don't see anything. But hopefully for their sake they are converging to one...

edit: Again side note: the Intel install, now appears to properly pick up my hacked up Arbotix (Trossen Robotics Atmega644p) as well as the Robotis CM9-...
 
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In UK universities IP is generally owned by the university. In my own experience I've never seen an issue at undergraduate level. I had a PhD student who refused to disclose his 'best' work in his thesis, took out patents at his own expense & is still looking for his shirt...

I recommend you do that, also read some articles about Copyright law, because you are obviously not very familiar with it.
No, he's right. In California it's the same deal. AFAIK it's quite common across the whole country. What you hand in is owned by the college unless you can prove you didn't use any university resources to make it, particularly their computers, networks, research you access through a paywall on their dime, etc. They might also be able to get you for asking any advice of your professor. You have to be careful about this if you're a student.

A good example of university resources = university ownership is BSD Unix. It's owned by "the Regents of the University of California." BSD was developed by faculty, who are under the same restriction unless their contract stipulates otherwise.
 
New U.S. direct Store http://store-usa.arduino.cc/ - not Arduino only - lots of Adafruit and some other stuff - but no Teensy (yet?)

The .org has only 'factory' boards (with 'coming soon' teasers) - in new BLOG history dating way back to FEB 2015 - they are crafting their view as they build their credentials as the maker of the maker stuff - seems desperate
 
I'm pretty sure we'd need to pretty significantly raise all Teensy prices to make that work.
I buy my 3.1s on Amazon for $25, where I get free shipping on most things. They get here in two days, every time, like clockwork. I can get them overnighted if I want to pay a little extra. Amazon is great like that.

I don't know who's reselling them through Amazon. I'd prefer that it was you. I'd like to pay less, or if that's not possible, at least have more of the revenue going directly to you. If it's going to someone else, it enriches them, but neither of us.
 
Karlsson Robotics appears to be the Amazon Prime shipper. I see them often in ebay sales, reselling Sparkfun and Adafruit products. When I go to them, it always has the feel of a small brick & mortar electronics shop that has morphed into online sales.
 
I first saw 195 Teensy LC's at Sparkfun - now "out of stock " at $12.95 and "We have a purchase for 500 units. We expect some of these to arrive next on Apr 8, 2015."

AdaFruit was out of stock on their first batch of LC's and now has 73 at $13.95. So these guys mark and up sell them too.

I bought my first 3 Teensy 3.1's from Sparkfun for $19.95 just to round up orders for free shipping. Having them in stock make for great impulse buys and exposure even if they get marked up. $25 from Amazon seems a bit much (good they are genuine Teensy) - even as a free ship Prime member - I get 2(3) day US Mail delivery from PJRC already. I considered going to OshPark to get them for $17 - but ordered LC's and Displays too and went PJRC direct.

If .cc would take Teensy's and mark them up it would help make them a one stop shop that might feed them income and give them a leg up over .org 'branded' hardware - with the IDE software being the differentiator. Showing the ZERO coming soon - and the silkscreen shows '.cc' not '.org'.

Something like this would make the Teensy much more accessible for out of the box prototyping - like Arduino's: Arduino Prototyping Shield There are a couple out there - I got some for $6 from Australia via Tindie
 
Arduino.cc seems heavily invested in the idea of plug-in shields. They don't seem to see large size, high cost, and poor shield interop (between Uno, Mega2560, Due ...) as drawbacks. Therefore they don't seem so keen on the Arduino mini/nano boards from companies to whom they licensed the Arduino name (or on Teensy).

A lot of their shop seems dedicated to Arduino-branded items ("Arduino at heart") which is again a brand licensing scheme. Presumably for such items in their shop they get distributor/reseller markup, as well as the brand licening cut which I understand is around 5%.

Then they have the "Arduino certified" category which seems to be a specific Intel-Arduino arrangement; no details are available and there is no way to apply for something to be "Arduino certified".

Their newly announced home automation system continues the plug-together concept and reminds me strongly of Korg LittleBits - little plastic modules that you plug end to end.

All of these licensing activities make more sense as a revenue stream given recent revelations that they are not getting any money from the actual Arduino-branded boards made in Italy, for at least the last year. Given their lukewarm support for boards not made in Italy (the Arduino certified ones are a separately maintained fork, for example; and in 1.6.2 third party boards get installed in the users home directory rather than being centrally installed) it seems they are ambivalent about third party board support in the Arduino IDE. This is unfortunate, because it prevents them promoting the IDE as a product in its own right. Instead it is merely presented as something for current Arduino boards (that they get no money for) and for future Arduino boards (that they don't yet sell, and where Arduino.org has a slight first-to-market advantage).
 
No, he's right. In California it's the same deal. AFAIK it's quite common across the whole country. What you hand in is owned by the college unless you can prove you didn't use any university resources to make it, particularly their computers, networks, research you access through a paywall on their dime, etc. They might also be able to get you for asking any advice of your professor. You have to be careful about this if you're a student.

A good example of university resources = university ownership is BSD Unix. It's owned by "the Regents of the University of California." BSD was developed by faculty, who are under the same restriction unless their contract stipulates otherwise.

NOT correct. For both CSU and UC systems, IP and copyright assigned to student, where student is not performing work as employee of the school. Recently assisted my nephew in censuring his instructor for use of his original material, without credit, for use in book and several teaching aids where the instructor received recompense.

IP policy for all CSU and UC schools are clearly stated on respective web sites. You might want to look at this stuff before further such utterance.
 
You might want to look at this stuff before further such utterance.
I don't know why you're getting upset with me, but it's not appropriate. I didn't hurt your nephew. What I did was repeat advice given to me on good faith by college instructors in California. They told me that in order to help me avoid a bad situation. I am repeating it in the same spirit.

As it turns out, I have very good reason to do so. Here is a counterexample to your claim, from here. They establish different levels of university involvement, and delineate that in cases where university resources are tapped above and beyond a limit (which they do not clearly define), the university has at least partial rights to the IP:
2.443 The Institution may incur expenses related to obtaining a copyright
or patent, development of the commercial potential of Intellectual
Property and administrative costs related thereto. If the Institution
incurs such expenses, the Institution is entitled to be reimbursed for
such expenses from any royalty income arising from the Intellectual
Property prior to any distribution to the Creator.
The terms laid out in the document are ambiguous enough that a person could read through them and think, "I'm safe." But - what if you used university resources for "commercial development"? Making the university pay for a patent or copyright is obvious, but development of commercial potential is nebulous and they do not define what they mean by this, or cite a specific example. They do provide examples of what they think is incidental, but not of what goes beyond that. This leaves the door open to them claiming that they should have a right to some or all profits, should there be litigation.

Therefore, I think it would be wiser for students to look up the policy at their specific institutions and figure out the pitfalls. It's easy to read a document like this and think that it aligns with your interests, but you have to look at it from the other side's angle, and from the perspective of a judge and jury who don't care about you or think you should be right just because you're you. Leaving the commercial development angle completely undefined is not something that would inspire confidence in me.
 
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