Arduino Dispute reaches out to Distributors

Actions like these will kill the whole arduino brand. It&#x27;s akin to parents that divorce claiming a physical half of their kids each, it simply will not work.<p>The rest of the world needs to see a unified front and to air your dirty laundry like this in an attempt to pre-empt the lawsuit is only going to turn off the recipients of this letter from the arduino brand and will cause them to look for alternatives elsewhere (of which there are quite a few by now).<p>What a pity, the arduino brand had a ton of goodwill attached.

It&#x27;s a shame that Arduino SRL is behaving like this. The smart move would&#x27;ve been to make up with the original founders instead of trying to shove them aside.<p>&quot;Open Source is the environment we want for millions&quot;<p>In my view, their actions don&#x27;t seem to embody the spirit of the open source movement.<p>I&#x27;ve gotten into the arduino environment recently and really enjoy it, even though I come from an embedded background. I hope this doesn&#x27;t stop the arduino environment and ecosystem.

So I have a small project I wanted to get into using Arduino, for which bigger full PC solutions like RPi aren&#x27;t suitable (small embedded controller for home automation). The Arduino &#x27;ecosystem&#x27; was confusing before this, now with this infighting it has become a total clusterfuck.<p>So, what alternatives are there? I need a simple, very cheap and very lower power chip that I can program easily using a regular PC and that can interface with a few optocouplers. Would it make sense to go directly for an ATmega? Or would I need additional circuitry to make that work? If I can program in C that would be OK, I don&#x27;t need the software to be &#x27;easy to use&#x27; - the hardware I&#x27;m unfamiliar with though so that needs to be plug and play.

I will admit that I find the whole issue bewildering, but my gut reaction is that I will in the long run care more about keeping the software flowing than the hardware.

Atmel ought to come out with an Arduino form factor board. They make the CPU, and they make lots of eval and demo boards. Just cut out the middleman.

Today&#x27;s business lesson:<p><pre><code> But everyone was friends, right? </code></pre> Wrong!<p>That&#x27;s why you need lawyers and contracts and agreements about who owns what intellectual property. That&#x27;s why you try to remove any and all ambiguity you can think of. Don&#x27;t worry, that won&#x27;t get remove all the &quot;fun&quot;. There will be plenty of new ambiguities to squabble over that you haven&#x27;t thought of yet.