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Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD

gnd · Vimeo · 12 HN points · 4 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention gnd's video "Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD".
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Arduino The Documentary 2010
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After watching the entire documentary I have reconsidered. It appears there is inconsistebt behavior or an exaggeration on the part of OP. Banzi is quite transparent and the origins seem pretty innocuous.

https://vimeo.com/18539129

I would say, as open source developers, we have no right against commercial forks of our code lest we choose a more restrictive license. I believe OP is tormented by the lack of valor in the quite prickly situation but as hackers and devs we need to defend fair use of what code is licensed by. Fair licensing, fair commercial endeavor. It sucks when someone forks without even making contact but part of me feels like open source should be a little bit wild west. The rules are sharp square and leave little for interpretation, thats how we want our freedom

fapjacks
I wish it were possible to bottle up your last paragraph and force new developers to drink it before they could learn to program. I mean, insofar as anybody should be able to force anybody to do anything.
goldenkey
Well, thanks, I think I speak for all of us in that last paragraph. :-)
Mar 05, 2016 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by goldenkey
Are these the same guys from this arduino documentary?

https://vimeo.com/18539129

EDIT: Yep - the first speaker in that doc is Banzi

This has been a fascinating story. As someone who has been an arduino user/fan for years I knew very little of what was going on till Hackaday started covering it.

The 1 minute primer:

"In short, there are two companies calling themselves “Arduino” at the moment. One, Arduino LLC was founded by [Massimo Banzi], [David Cuartielles], [David Mellis], [Tom Igoe] and [Gianluca Martino] in 2009, runs the website arduino.cc, and has been directing and releasing the code that makes it all work. Most of these folks had been working together on what would become the Arduino project since as early as 2005.

The other “Arduino” used to be called Smart Projects and was the manufacturing arm of the project founded and run by [Gianluca Martino]. Smart Projects changed their name to Arduino SRL in November 2014. (A “Società a responsabilità limitata” is one form of Italian limited-liability company.) They have been a major producer of Arduino boards from the very beginning and recently registered the domain arduino.org."

Read more at HAD (http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/)

For background (before the recent turmoil) there is a documentary about arduino. https://vimeo.com/18539129

at-fates-hands
In Italy are there no laws about infringing another companies trademark property? Here in the US, If I started a company called Pepsi, LLC I'd get sued within minutes of filing my business license.

It seems to me they have a very strong case for infringement based on using the exact same business name. Again, here in the US, even similar sounding business names are open to be sued:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244249

http://the-llc-company.com/form-llc/trademark-infringement-b...

The case that pretty much started it all, so much so, now the rules of infringement are often referred to as the "The Polaroid Factors":

https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tmcas...

aij
Trademarks are per-country, not global.

For example, the iFone vs. iPhone conflict in Mexico doesn't affect the rest of the world.

smcl
The story as described by the GP is shortened for clarity, but apparently there was no bad blood between the teams when "Arduino Srl" was registered and it was believed one individual held that italian trademark on behalf of the team on good faith. It was only much later that Arduino Srl started the whole imitation game
ihsw
How was this allowed to happen? It's like Dell renaming itself to "Microsoft SRL" and then selling "Windows 9000" to beat MS on the version number train.

Am I incorrect in my observation?

Was Arduino supposed to be an open name that anyone can adopt, a la Unix and all the varieties that are derived from that name (HPUX, Linux, BSD Unix, UnixWare, Unix System V, etc)?

toyg
It's like "Windows" was trademarked in Italy several years ago in a way that became known only when "Microsoft" went to trademark "Windows" in the US. Now "Dell" can sell "Windows" in Italy and "Microsoft" can sell it in the US.

This happened mostly because "Dell" was the only manufacturer of "Windows" systems for a while, and didn't really appreciate that "Microsoft" wanted to license "Windows" on other hardware. Add to it that the original "Dell" founder has actually sold the lot to a third party with no previous history, who clearly does not care about the community.

thekevan
"It's like Dell renaming itself to "Microsoft SRL" and then selling "Windows 9000" to beat MS on the version number train."

Not really. It would be more like Dell splitting into two companies, one for hardware one for software, and then later not really getting along and fighting over the name.

hoopism
Massimo did an interview with Make that explains his side of things a bit:

http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...

Untit1ed
It's a bit like that if Michael Dell was one of the original Microsoft founders and fell out with Bill Gates et al.
abstractbeliefs
When Arduino got popular, the original team of five spun off a manufacturing company, Smart Projects, to handle the manufacturing and distribution tedium, with 4 of the 5 partners staying in the Development arm. When push came to shove and the development side wanted to make the manufacturing non-exclusive, Smart Projects beat them to the legal punch and registered the trademark before the development team did, forked and uprevved what they could, and cut off the income from sales going back to the dev team.
frik
The German Heise News had an article:

Arduino against Arduino: Founder argue about the company

English: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

German: http://www.heise.de/make/meldung/Arduino-gegen-Arduino-Gruen...

Alupis
Seems to be a lot of "piggy-backers" piling onto the Github page without understanding the history...

> By the way, you (meaning the people who started this phony organization and made this phony fork) know that you've made the front page of Hacker News, right? If you continue, there will be no shortage of people who will constantly point out that you're a bunch of wannabe fakers.

It's sad that HN is perpetuating this behavior.

kordless
People would rather blame someone else for something they rationalize the someone else has done than blame themselves for the things they just did. We're broken in that regard, and it's time to fix it.
pygy_
They're right. See [0] for the details.

Excerpt:

When the Arduino project started, the five co-founders (myself [Massimo Banzi] , David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, and Gianluca Martino) decided to create a company that would own the trademarks and manage the business side of Arduino: Manufacturers would build and sell boards, Arduino would get a royalty from them like in many other businesses, such as in the fashion world. This happened in April 2008 when Arduino LLC was founded and the bylaws of the company specified that each of the five founders would transfer to this company any ownership of the Arduino brand. At the end of 2008 when Arduino was about to register the trademark in the US and worldwide, unknown to us and without any advance notice, Gianluca’s company Smart Projects — our main boards manufacturer — went ahead and registered the Arduino name in Italy and kept this news for himself for almost two years.

After the process of registering in the US was over and our lawyer tried to extend the trademark to the rest of the world, he realised that somebody had registered it already in Italy. We (Tom, David, David, and I) were shocked and demanded explanations. Gianluca reassured us that this was done to protect our collective investment. We were friends (or so we thought), so based on this agreement we kept working together for years, received royalties while quietly trying to bring the trademark back into the Arduino company through endless discussions that dragged on while Arduino became very successful thanks to the hard work each one of us put into it (and for a long time we didn’t even get a salary out of it).

As the project became more successful and sales increased, the attempts at regaining control of the Italian trademark registration became more and more difficult with larger and larger demands made to us while Gianluca effectively vetoed us from either bringing in other manufacturers or get any external investment. We made headway with Arduino creating a lot of innovation, pushing the boundaries of open source hardware, hiring a lot of talented people around the world and ultimately building an amazing community around the arduino.cc website.

———

0. http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...

Alupis
I wouldn't exactly call a founder-spin-off a "bunch of wannabe fakers" and a "phony organization" and a "phony fork".

There was a disagreement, and one founder went his own way. The story is clearly messy and very unfortunate for the Arduino founders, but there's nothing "phony" or "fake" here.

deeviant
I wouldn't exactly call a duplicitous and wilful act of attempting to subvert a trade name and associated business from those who approached and enriched said subverting party in good faith a "founder-spin-off."
pygy_
"Phony" is charitable.

Smart Projects LLC has been acting in bad faith for at least seven years (registering the trademark in Italy after having pledged to transfer the IP to Arduino LLC).

Mar 16, 2011 · 3 points, 0 comments · submitted by evo_9
The Arduino Documentary is worth watching. http://vimeo.com/18539129

The talked with the initial developers about the how the project came to be and what their goals were.

Jan 08, 2011 · 8 points, 1 comments · submitted by potomak
jasongullickson
This is a great intro to Open Source Hardware.
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