Having worked in the Open Hardware community for a while, I think the most important part is:<p>PDFs are not considered design files
<a href="https://www.oshwa.org/definition/" rel="nofollow">https://www.oshwa.org/definition/</a><p>If you apply this rule, you can exclude 90% of the "Open Source/Hardware" products on the market.<p>Also 99% are missing a BOM (Bill Of Materials).
That's like shipping an open source software without the config files, forcing the users to figure out the settings by reading the sources.
Unless they are buying the pre-compiled binaries from the author.
My colleagues have developed a "spitting noise" ritual after any utterance of the word "Arduino" (<hock> ptui). As embedded developers attempting to teach others, they're not enamored of Arduino's burgeoning, and dominant, market of "people who want to do embedded development but not learn anything about embedded development" sucking up all the oxygen. I know, that's an oversimplification, but not as much of one as I could wish.<p>I don't want to wish anyone ill, but the emergence and success of competitors that don't go so far out of the way to hide the complexity (and the need for good practice) of working with embedded systems and SBCs, wouldn't be such a bad addition to the ecosystem.<p>(As one of two developers who actually fool around with Arduinos and Pis a fair bit (although I detest the Arduino dev environment and 'sketches'), I'm tired of all the vandalism and graffiti in my cubicle, TBH).
The answer to the question if these products are open source, the answer is: no.<p>Here is my blog post from more than 2 years ago regarding the status of the Arduino Yùn:<p><a href="http://www.wifi4things.com/arduino-yun-what-is-under-the-hood/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wifi4things.com/arduino-yun-what-is-under-the-hoo...</a><p>And here is my clarification request on the Arduino forum, which is still unanswered:<p><a href="http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=187766.0" rel="nofollow">http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=187766.0</a>
Hopefully I can provide a bit of insight on this, currently working on open hardware myself.<p>OSHW certification is a self-certification process. Individual products are certified, not companies. What Torrone is doing is conflating Arduino the company (or foundation, or companies, or whatever it is this week, guys please stahp) and Arduino the product <i>series</i>, and individual Arduino products. He knows what he's doing, but in this email does it anyway. Perhaps for good cause, but it's what he's doing.<p>There is no requirement for Arduino to certify all of it's hardware with OSHWA. In fact given the explosion of things-that-are-branded-arduino it would be unsurprising to see hardware that cannot be certified as open due to commercial agreements that override open licences. Whether this affects Arduino or not long term is a different matter but the Uno, Nano and Pro Mini are all still open.<p>OSHWA is an attempt to define what constitutes Open Source Hardware and to define some (hopefully) sane defaults. It's the hardware equivalent of the FSF, and it's licence is the maker equivalent of the GPL. It is not the only fruit.<p>My project[1] uses the V-USB library, which comes with an open licence[2]. The project is derived from another project, the digispark[3]. We're operating within the licence constraints, and consider our project to be open hardware (we're posting our board designs when we ship at the end of this month).<p>To further complicate things, when Arduino uses the term Open Source it rarely clarifies what that means. It may be referring to the software stack. It might be (but probably isn't in this day and age) referring to new hardware.<p>Either way, while it is right to pressure Arduino to clarify their position, I think it's unfair to mandate that every product they ever produce must comply with OSHWA's definition of Open Source Hardware, or that only OSHWA certified hardware can be considered "open hardware".<p>[1] - <a href="https://hidiot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://hidiot.com/</a><p>[2] - <a href="https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.obdev.at/products/vusb/license.html</a><p>[3] - <a href="https://digistump.com/" rel="nofollow">https://digistump.com/</a>
I started with arduino a few years ago as a hobby and loved it as an easy way to get into the field but lately I have been realizing how many terrible habits I've obtained by learning this way. It took me weeks to retrain my brain to prefer looking at schematics instead of the breadboard views and I'm still trying to learn atmel studio and directly programming chips. It's coming along but slowly.<p>I still think arduino is a great way for interested people to break into electronics but there is no clear 'line in the sand' when they should stop learning that way
Also relevant: <a href="http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-distributors-were-the-real-arduino/" rel="nofollow">http://hackaday.com/2015/03/28/arduino-srl-to-distributors-w...</a>
Creators do not like to follow rules. Avoidance of a bunch of nitpicks is probably the only way to motivate them.<p>IMHO, it is not a war, just a childish fight that is mostly positive.
Adafruit is not as cool as one might expect. I was sourcing boards from them and my parcel got missing from courier company. I complained to them. Initially they tried to help but nothing came out of it. Guess what they did next ? My account with them was disabled . It almost knocked my little startup off the ground. I wrote mails but to no avail.