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Enshittification of Arduino Begins? Qualcomm Starts Clamping Down (itsfoss.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/hardware@programming.dev
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When Qualcomm announced its acquisition of Arduino in October 2025, the tinkerer and maker community watched nervously. Large corporate acquisitions rarely end well for open platforms after all, and enshittification is something that often follows.

And now, what's followed is unsettling. Adafruit Industries, makers of popular development boards and a respected voice in the open hardware space, have sounded the alarm.

According to Adafruit, the new policies introduce sweeping user-license provisions, broaden data collection (particularly around AI usage), and embed long-term account data retention, all while integrating user information into Qualcomm’s broader data ecosystem.

Section 7.1 grants Arduino a perpetual, irrevocable license over anything you upload. Your code, projects, forum posts, and comments all fall under this. This remains in effect even after you delete your account. Arduino retains rights to your content indefinitely.

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[–] 64 points 9 months ago (1 child)

Damn, I had no idea Qualcomm bought them.

Qualcomm is one of the worst companies. I'm certainly not going to support Arduino anymore.

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    • [–] 46 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Section 7.1 grants Arduino a perpetual, irrevocable license over anything you upload. Your code, projects, forum posts, and comments all fall under this. This remains in effect even after you delete your account. Arduino retains rights to your content indefinitely.

    This can't be something they can do under the GDPR, right? You have your right to have your data deleted and to be forgotten.

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  • [–] 28 points 9 months ago

    You have your right to have personally identifying data deleted. My understanding is that most companies let you delete everything because that's the simplest way to comply but they don't have to do it that way, they can just take your name off of everything and anonymize it instead. Like how all your posts remain on Reddit if you delete your account, they're just no longer associated with your old username.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    Arduino has always been a kinda shitified version of Wiring. The “founders” stole it from one of their grad students and have been making kinda dumb decisions since.

    The main thing they’ve been good at is marketing. Arduino is a great name, but stumbling into the oddly positioned headers to make the shields unique is a good example of kinda dumb choices. Also the infighting with the board maker and ex-professors.

    Wiring is a terrible name for a language, and completely unsearchable, but here’s a link to the originators of the wiring language (what became arduino) if you’re interested.

    https://wiring.org.co/

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    • [–] 32 points 9 months ago

    Fork and fuck off time.

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    [–] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    Geez. Everybody should switch to PlatformIO already. It’s multiple magnitudes better. You can version control your dependencies without hunting down each package. That alone would be worth the switch.

    As for hardware, ESP32 is also a magnitude more powerful, cheaper and smaller than Arduino. They can use the same code.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Their documentation is a bit shit (took me an entire night to figure out how to flash the code I compiled, and their built in web interface doesn't help) but otherwise yea it's a convenient piece of kit

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    • [–] 18 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Since when can you just buy a nonprofit? I guess nothing that's not crime can ever be trusted?

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    • [–] 16 points 9 months ago

    It's a shame. But personally, I prefer ESP32 devices more these days anyway.

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    [–] 5 points 9 months ago

    Well that was coming. Rip.

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    [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    Perpetually licensing things copyleft is good. What's the license?

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