| Panic Over Arduino Ts and Cs |
| Written by Harry Fairhead |
| Wednesday, 26 November 2025 |
|
It could have been good news that Qualcomm had taken over Arduino. Adding its financial muscle and processor resources to the very popular development environment could have, and still could, produce something rewarding for everyone. But Arduinophiles are panicking over some changes to the licensing. As we reported last month, Arduino has been taken over by Qualcomm. Given that the whole Arduino ecosystem has long been aggressively open source, now having a company that makes a lot of money from patents in charge gives is obviously a cause for concern. Using an Arduino and its software is generally seen to be as a learning experience providing plenty of scope for exploration and friendly cooperation. Until now this spirit of openness has done nothing but good for the platform.
The fear of a changed Arduino was given a boost by the publication of new Terms-of-Service explicitly banning reverse engineering: 8.2 User shall not:
Not to reverse-engineer the platform seems to be against the open source idea and it has caused some to announce the death of the Arduino. Of course, it all depends what you mean by Platform. The ToS doesn't seem to define it, but the Arduino blog attempts to clarify the situation:
Restrictions on reverse-engineering apply specifically to our Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. Anything that was open, stays open.
This is reassuring, but it is hardly a definition of what "Platform" means. The ToS repeatedly says things like:
By using the Site, the Platform, or the Services, you declare to have read and accepted these Terms.
which suggests that "the Platform" isn't just the site.
It doesn't seem to be clear what is covered by the reverse engineering term no matter what the blog claims. However it is true that if something is open source it is difficult to see what reverse-engineering means. So, as long as the licence doesn't change, we should all be happy.
Another area of worry is reuse of user content. The ToS now say
User grants to Arduino the non-exclusive, royalty free, transferable, sub-licensable, perpetual, irrevocable, to the maximum extent allowed by applicable law, for the duration of intellectual property rights and without detriment to User’s statutory rights (including applicable data protection rights), right to use the Content published and/or updated on the Platform as well as to distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish and make publicly visible all material, including software, libraries, text contents, images, videos, comments, text, audio, software, libraries, or other data (collectively, “Content”) that User publishes, uploads, or otherwise makes available to Arduino throughout the world using any means and for any purpose, including the use of any username or nickname specified in relation to the Content.
which is a much too long a sentence. Basically it seems to mean that anything you do on the site is fair game for Arduino to reuse and even make money from. From my point of view, this makes online development with the Arduino slightly less attractive than it was, but I have never been keen on using cloud services for any development - it is too fragile for something so important. I don't think this is the death of the Arduino - far from it. While Arduino is not exactly too big to fail, it does have a huge following. There are a number of companies who would gain from Arduino's demise and it is worth taking their comments with a pinch of self interested salt. This is not to say Arduino is perfect - it has too many hardware offerings and while its software is excellent for getting started and for quick prototyping, it often doesn't support the more idiosyncratic features of the hardware. I'm hoping that the takeover injects some additional life into the system.
More InformationThe Arduino Terms of Service and Privacy Policy update: setting the record straight Related ArticlesArduino UNO Q Takes On Raspberry Pi Programming The ESP32 Using Arduino - PWM Arduino IDE 1.8.11 - The State Of The Arduinosphere Arduino Back To Being One Company To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin. 
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| Last Updated ( Wednesday, 26 November 2025 ) |
