alranel · HackerTrans

This is well explained here: https://support.arduino.cc/hc/en-us/articles/360020652100-Ho...

A counterfeit is a product that tries to deceive customers making them believe that it's manufactured by someone else (regardless of the open source nature of its design). Open source hardware design only makes for a part of a commercial product and does not cover manufacturing, supply chain, quality of components, warranty, customer support etc. etc. for which it's important to distinguish who is the actual entity responsible for that product.

alranel

há 3 anosdiscuss

Without implying that your purchase choices are wrong by any mean, it's worth reminding that the price difference incorporates several hidden costs:

  - general higher costs to manufacture in Europe (including labor rights)
  - certifications about hazardous substances, radio compliance etc.
  - R&D (clones just download the CAD file and load it into the machines with zero costs for product design, development, testing etc.)
  - software development of the cores/board support packages (clones benefit from the upstream development with zero cost on their side)
  - software development of the tooling (IDE, CLI...) which is a recurring cost as things need to be maintained (clones benefit from the work done by Arduino with zero cost on their side)
  - marketing/adv/evangelism/documentation (clones have almost zero cost as they benefit from the long tail of the promotion made by Arduino)

That said, this is legit and Arduino even encourages it by deliberately making the products open source hardware thus releasing the files that any cloner can use and become a competitor at a fraction of the original costs. Buyers can freely choose if they want to support those costs or not, it's up to their ethics, budget and personal choice. But the prices are different because there are different thing inside.

alranel

há 3 anosdiscuss

A couple facts about Arduino to make sure the discussion doesn't take weird directions:

- In the last years, the Arduino team has been releasing MORE open source stuff than it had been doing in the past. This is documented transparently in the yearly open source reports: https://blog.arduino.cc/2022/01/13/the-2021-arduino-open-sou... https://blog.arduino.cc/2023/01/20/the-2022-arduino-open-sou... Even recently, the flagship Arduino product (UNO) was renewed and with no surprise it's still completely open source.

- In parallel, a vertical line of industrial products (managed by a subsidiary called "Arduino Pro") was added that for documented reasons has all the requirements of open source hardware (including full schematics and fully open source software stack) except for the CAD files which are available on request. This level of openness is the same as a Raspberry Pi, if not higher because all components are available on the market. The existence of this additional product line does not imply at all that Arduino reduced its commitment to open source because, as said above, such commitment is even higher than in the past.

Based on these facts, in no way it is reasonable to state that "Arduino is going closed source" or that its business is "opaque". All opinions are legit, but if they don't take facts into account it's just misinformation or marketing...

alranel

há 5 anosdiscuss

Can you please link the repository you're talking about?

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