As the co-founder of Arduino I can confirm this was a great inspiration for me. I learned electronics with this kit when I was 7 and it gave me also a great appreciation for design as well. The way I taught electronics to designers was also inspired by the method used in the book that came with the kit. I still have the book from my original kit. It’s an amazing tool

[OT] Great to see Massimo hanging out in Hacker News :)

Thank you!

have you read the actual email.. ? It's pretty bad. I've co-founded a very succesfull open source project and I can assure you a lot of people treat maintainers like crap. One guy sent me a few mails with veiled death threats because I banned him from the forum (He was harassing users and the community decide to boot him...)

The Programma 101 is an amazing device. If you are ever in Ivrea (the birth place of Olivetti) there is lovely little museum called "Tecnologicamente" where members of the original Olivetti team meet up to fix Programma 101 and tell the story. It's not the CHM but it's a beautiful little place. http://www.museotecnologicamente.it/

users, especially beginners, like consistency. So you call that "stagnation" I call that "avoid adding stuff that people don't really need". We make more than 100 different products so we haven't stagnated at all.

And yet that "stuff people don't really need" is selling like hot cakes at your competitors, only for a worse variant to eventually show up at Arduino - although it probably won't even be carried by your own distributors. Sparkfun and Adafruit are reinventing the hobbyist ecosystem with STEMMA/Qwiic. Meanwhile Arduino was (despite the failed kickstarter) earlier to market with the competing ESLOV connector - which seven years later isn't even found on your own bread&butter controller boards.

Look, I had fun with Arduino back in the days, but in 2023 you folks simply don't have an attractive product range anymore. When I open Adafruit's website I am almost guaranteed to immediately be greeted by a handful of brand new products which immediately look interesting to me. When I open the Arduino website I have to do a lot of effort to even find a product lineup, and even when I manage to finally get there it isn't at all obvious what I should buy and why.

I own several Arduino products, and I genuinely forgot you existed. For your sake I sincerely hope I just live in a massive filter bubble and am massively mistaken about the hobbyist market.

Actually we're not going down that path at all. we are still doing the same things we were doing before. we have no plans for "enshittifying" our business model

You're just going to put yourself in a bad spot chasing comments around online.

YOU are not going down that path.

But investors are now the ones shaping the paths.

Arduino is hardly the first company to take on VC money. Everyone here is intimately familiar with how it always plays out, and the dynamics that will force around even the most pure hearted leader.

It's best not to say anything, you are only going to look foolish trying to explain to a bunch of veteran tech heads how "This time its different!".

Thank you for saying that, I really hope it will go the right wholesome way.

What a fundamental contribution to the discussion :)

I try :)

I know this is written for the investors, but it makes your potential professional customers feel a little sick.

co founder of Arduino here) actually I hate web3 I think it's a pile of bullshit and it's slowly fading away... We've never been interested in that.

We do sell services but we try to avoid bullshit terms like "servitization"

Since I've got you, allow me to apologize for all the knee-jerk cynics in this thread. I trust you will continue to ship great product and that your incentives will remain aligned with those of your users.

Just pinky promise me that you won't make Arduino IDE a subscription :)

no they won't... the money is used to develop our Professional products for enterprise customers.. the classic arduino will always be free. We've never build anything that would use licensing servers etc... BTW Arduino is headquartered in Switzerland/Italy/Sweden/USA so... no UK there

Of course Arduino will be free, with optional/required registration. You will start by selling cheap labor leads to your professional customers. "Hot Arduino programmers in your area are waiting to meet you".

Actually there are 21000 companies that have bough our products and 2000 of them just the professional tools... so the situation is very different

If you respect the open source license , you're free to use the Arduino code in products. We offer a licensing scheme for companies that want to license the hardware designs to use in proprietary products. The IDE is there, it's free, it's more powerful than ever and it supports any architecture the community wants to work on. Free, no royalties no licenses etc