This is a much more negative take than I have on Adafruit. Adafruit is, to me, a great provider of breakout boards and gives generously to the community while trying to stay in business. They might be slightly more profitable if they closed off everything they could. I’ve used their libraries on a lot of projects without using their hardware.
Their stuff works, is open, and when I used one of their LSM6DS dev boards on a 32-bit micro, it had an underflow bug; because that board and library was open-source, I could fix it the same afternoon I got the package. The fix was simple and obvious, they accepted my pull request, and now no one else has to waste that hour. That’s the power of open source to me.
I hold Adafruit and Limor in a positive light and think their “bloatware” is very effective in making electronics accessible to many more people than before, much the same as the $30 Arduino did for the $2 AVR. The ecosystem and accessibility matter.
I agree that they’re seeking success of Adafruit, and agree that’s not a bad thing, but I don’t see how they’re going closed. What is “closed” about their ecosystem? The article we’re discussing is about MIT-licensed software on their GitHub.
Their stuff works, is open, and when I used one of their LSM6DS dev boards on a 32-bit micro, it had an underflow bug; because that board and library was open-source, I could fix it the same afternoon I got the package. The fix was simple and obvious, they accepted my pull request, and now no one else has to waste that hour. That’s the power of open source to me.
I hold Adafruit and Limor in a positive light and think their “bloatware” is very effective in making electronics accessible to many more people than before, much the same as the $30 Arduino did for the $2 AVR. The ecosystem and accessibility matter.
I agree that they’re seeking success of Adafruit, and agree that’s not a bad thing, but I don’t see how they’re going closed. What is “closed” about their ecosystem? The article we’re discussing is about MIT-licensed software on their GitHub.