Makers slam Qualcomm for tightening the clamps on Arduino
(2025/11/21)
- Reference: 1763752181
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/21/adafruit_makers_unhappy_with_arduino/
- Source link:
Qualcomm quietly rewrote the terms of service for its newest acquisition, programmable microcontroller and SBC maker Arduino, drawing intense fire from the maker community for grabbing additional rights to user-generated content on its platform and prohibiting reverse-engineering of what was once very open software.
In a level of open criticism that's unusually frank for Microsoft's corporate-friendly business-networking site, hobbyist electronics vendor Adafruit published a [1]stinging assessment of the rewritten terms and conditions for Qualcomm's new subsidiary Arduino, saying that "the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform."
The New York-based open-source electronics vendor has harsh views about the new [2]Arduino Privacy Policy and new [3]Terms and Conditions . Among its comments, Adafruit's post says:
The new documents introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload, broad surveillance-style monitoring of AI features, a clause preventing users from identifying potential patent infringement, years-long retention of usernames even after account deletion, and the integration of all user data (including minors) into Qualcomm's global data ecosystem.
If that were not worrying enough, it notes:
Users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.
LinkedIn Commenters agreed with Adafruit's assessment.
"It was great knowing you Arduino, RIP. Hello, RP2040 and ESP32, hope we have a great future ahead," wrote Venky Raju, a CTO security firm ColorTokens.
[4]
"QCOMM does not understand anything about the Maker space," Frank DeLaTorre, a board design engineer, wrote. "They are a greedy corporation that doesn't give a crap about the community that Arduino has built over the past 10+ years."
[5]
[6]
The reaction on X was swift and damning also. "RIP Arduino! Qualcomm just destroyed it," wrote a user named EV_TRAPPER.
"This fucking sucks but wasn't unexpected," wrote [7]Adrien barbeau-bot . "Arduino was the primary motivator for revitalizing the electronic hobbyist movement and open hardware community. What a fucking shit move."
[8]
For comparison, here is Arduino's [9]2020 privacy policy and [10]2020 terms and conditions – the oldest copies we could find on the Internet Archive, but pretty close to the ones from September of this year, just before [11]Qualcomm's October purchase of the company . The Register 's own Rupert Goodwins [12]warned us things would change just a few days later – and it looks to us like he called it.
Founder Limor "Ladyada" Fried started Adafruit Industries in her MIT dorm room in 2005, and it's still based in New York City today. The Reg covered the [13]hack of Microsoft's Kinect XBox controller for which Adafruit awarded a $2,000 bounty in 2010. Adafruit makes its own open hardware, such as the Feather microcontroller, which the Reg [14]mentioned just last month .
Smart, programmable open hardware like this is not unique to Arduino; it just carved out a niche by making electronics and microcontrollers easy and accessible without much specialist knowledge. Arduino wasn't the first such organization to make simple microcontroller boards and easy software to program them.
[15]
Another instance is [16]Wiring , a project started in 2003 by Colombian developer Hernando Barragán. One of his influences was Casey Reas's Java-based graphical programming and experimentation environment, [17]Processing . Wiring inherited its development process based around sketches from Processing, but changed the language to C++.
If "sketches" in C++ should sound familiar to any Arduino users, well, there's a reason, as Barragán describes in [18]The Untold History of Arduino . For his 2004 master's thesis at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy, Barragán designed and described Wiring, his "open-source programming framework for microcontrollers," based around an easy-to-use C++ programming environment combined with single-board hardware powered by the [19]ATMega128 microcontroller .
The supervisors for Barragán's master's degree were Casey Reas and IDII associate professor [20]Massimo Banzi . In 2005, Banzi, along with [21]David Cuartielles and IDII student [22]David Mellis , forked the open-source Wiring design, changing the hardware to use the smaller, cheaper [23]ATMega8 chip .
IDII shut down in 2006. As the [24]IEEE Spectrum described in 2011 , Banzi, Mellis, and Cuartielles, along with [25]Tom Igoe and Gianluca Martino – whose company Smart Projects SRL made the boards – launched the resulting system as the original Arduino. Although it seems to be gone now, the [26]old Arduino Credits page does indeed give a small tip of Arduino's hat to Barragán's project:
The Arduino language syntax is based on Wiring by Hernando Barragan.
The current incident is not the first time that Arduino has faced controversy.
In 2015, LWN reported a [27]trademark battle between US company Arduino LLC and the Italian manufacturer of the hardware, although the next year they [28]settled their differences .
[29]Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?
[30]Raspberry Pi not affected by Trump tariffs yet while China-tied rivals feel the heat
[31]Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club
[32]Qualcomm solders Arduino to its edge AI ambitions, debuts Raspberry Pi rival
Adafruit co-founder Philip Torrone told The Register:
Everything we've said so far is sourced, documented, and spans a long arc the community already knows. Arduino was built by the community, and Qualcomm/Arduino have never really liked what the community created. It feels like a Frankenstein moment: the creature calls out to its creator, and discovers the creator has been replaced by a corporation that plans to strip it for parts… I wonder if the monster calls out for Massimo, or Hernando?
The Register also contacted Arduino's PR representatives yesterday, but unfortunately the people we needed to talk to were travelling from the USA back to Europe and were not available to talk to us before the end of the week. We hope to talk to them soon – and if we do, we may return to this subject in the very near future. ®
Get our [33]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adafruit_opensource-privacy-techpolicy-activity-7396903362237054976-r14H/
[2] https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/
[3] https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://x.com/shadowsmythe/status/1991540004439663057
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20201216073610/https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20201209083015/https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/qualcomm_arduino_acquisition/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/arduino_new_job/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/09/kinect_hack/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/halloween_hacking_led_masks/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://wiring.org.co/about.html
[17] https://processing.org/
[18] https://arduinohistory.github.io/
[19] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/ATMEGA128
[20] https://massimobanzi.com/
[21] https://blog.arduino.cc/2019/10/25/meet-david-cuartielles-arduino-co-founder-with-a-passion-for-education/
[22] https://people.interactionivrea.org/d.mellis
[23] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/atmega8
[24] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-making-of-arduino
[25] https://tigoe.com/
[26] https://web.archive.org/web/20060615141853/https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Credits
[27] https://lwn.net/Articles/637755/
[28] https://blog.arduino.cc/2016/10/01/two-arduinos-become-one-2/
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/02/raspberry_pi_not_affected_by_tariff/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/raspberry_pi_os_lmde_debian_13/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/qualcomm_arduino_acquisition/
[33] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
In a level of open criticism that's unusually frank for Microsoft's corporate-friendly business-networking site, hobbyist electronics vendor Adafruit published a [1]stinging assessment of the rewritten terms and conditions for Qualcomm's new subsidiary Arduino, saying that "the changes mark a clear break from the open-hardware ethos that built the platform."
The New York-based open-source electronics vendor has harsh views about the new [2]Arduino Privacy Policy and new [3]Terms and Conditions . Among its comments, Adafruit's post says:
The new documents introduce an irrevocable, perpetual license over anything users upload, broad surveillance-style monitoring of AI features, a clause preventing users from identifying potential patent infringement, years-long retention of usernames even after account deletion, and the integration of all user data (including minors) into Qualcomm's global data ecosystem.
If that were not worrying enough, it notes:
Users are now explicitly forbidden from reverse-engineering or even attempting to understand how the platform works unless Arduino gives permission.
LinkedIn Commenters agreed with Adafruit's assessment.
"It was great knowing you Arduino, RIP. Hello, RP2040 and ESP32, hope we have a great future ahead," wrote Venky Raju, a CTO security firm ColorTokens.
[4]
"QCOMM does not understand anything about the Maker space," Frank DeLaTorre, a board design engineer, wrote. "They are a greedy corporation that doesn't give a crap about the community that Arduino has built over the past 10+ years."
[5]
[6]
The reaction on X was swift and damning also. "RIP Arduino! Qualcomm just destroyed it," wrote a user named EV_TRAPPER.
"This fucking sucks but wasn't unexpected," wrote [7]Adrien barbeau-bot . "Arduino was the primary motivator for revitalizing the electronic hobbyist movement and open hardware community. What a fucking shit move."
[8]
For comparison, here is Arduino's [9]2020 privacy policy and [10]2020 terms and conditions – the oldest copies we could find on the Internet Archive, but pretty close to the ones from September of this year, just before [11]Qualcomm's October purchase of the company . The Register 's own Rupert Goodwins [12]warned us things would change just a few days later – and it looks to us like he called it.
Founder Limor "Ladyada" Fried started Adafruit Industries in her MIT dorm room in 2005, and it's still based in New York City today. The Reg covered the [13]hack of Microsoft's Kinect XBox controller for which Adafruit awarded a $2,000 bounty in 2010. Adafruit makes its own open hardware, such as the Feather microcontroller, which the Reg [14]mentioned just last month .
Smart, programmable open hardware like this is not unique to Arduino; it just carved out a niche by making electronics and microcontrollers easy and accessible without much specialist knowledge. Arduino wasn't the first such organization to make simple microcontroller boards and easy software to program them.
[15]
Another instance is [16]Wiring , a project started in 2003 by Colombian developer Hernando Barragán. One of his influences was Casey Reas's Java-based graphical programming and experimentation environment, [17]Processing . Wiring inherited its development process based around sketches from Processing, but changed the language to C++.
If "sketches" in C++ should sound familiar to any Arduino users, well, there's a reason, as Barragán describes in [18]The Untold History of Arduino . For his 2004 master's thesis at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Italy, Barragán designed and described Wiring, his "open-source programming framework for microcontrollers," based around an easy-to-use C++ programming environment combined with single-board hardware powered by the [19]ATMega128 microcontroller .
The supervisors for Barragán's master's degree were Casey Reas and IDII associate professor [20]Massimo Banzi . In 2005, Banzi, along with [21]David Cuartielles and IDII student [22]David Mellis , forked the open-source Wiring design, changing the hardware to use the smaller, cheaper [23]ATMega8 chip .
IDII shut down in 2006. As the [24]IEEE Spectrum described in 2011 , Banzi, Mellis, and Cuartielles, along with [25]Tom Igoe and Gianluca Martino – whose company Smart Projects SRL made the boards – launched the resulting system as the original Arduino. Although it seems to be gone now, the [26]old Arduino Credits page does indeed give a small tip of Arduino's hat to Barragán's project:
The Arduino language syntax is based on Wiring by Hernando Barragan.
The current incident is not the first time that Arduino has faced controversy.
In 2015, LWN reported a [27]trademark battle between US company Arduino LLC and the Italian manufacturer of the hardware, although the next year they [28]settled their differences .
[29]Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?
[30]Raspberry Pi not affected by Trump tariffs yet while China-tied rivals feel the heat
[31]Raspberry Pi OS, LMDE, Peppermint OS join the Debian 13 club
[32]Qualcomm solders Arduino to its edge AI ambitions, debuts Raspberry Pi rival
Adafruit co-founder Philip Torrone told The Register:
Everything we've said so far is sourced, documented, and spans a long arc the community already knows. Arduino was built by the community, and Qualcomm/Arduino have never really liked what the community created. It feels like a Frankenstein moment: the creature calls out to its creator, and discovers the creator has been replaced by a corporation that plans to strip it for parts… I wonder if the monster calls out for Massimo, or Hernando?
The Register also contacted Arduino's PR representatives yesterday, but unfortunately the people we needed to talk to were travelling from the USA back to Europe and were not available to talk to us before the end of the week. We hope to talk to them soon – and if we do, we may return to this subject in the very near future. ®
Get our [33]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adafruit_opensource-privacy-techpolicy-activity-7396903362237054976-r14H/
[2] https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy/
[3] https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions/
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://x.com/shadowsmythe/status/1991540004439663057
[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20201216073610/https://www.arduino.cc/en/privacy-policy
[10] https://web.archive.org/web/20201209083015/https://www.arduino.cc/en/terms-conditions
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/qualcomm_arduino_acquisition/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/13/arduino_new_job/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/09/kinect_hack/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/30/halloween_hacking_led_masks/
[15] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/systems&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aSDvCOR6HEa2fS2Yd-dwNAAAAAU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[16] https://wiring.org.co/about.html
[17] https://processing.org/
[18] https://arduinohistory.github.io/
[19] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/ATMEGA128
[20] https://massimobanzi.com/
[21] https://blog.arduino.cc/2019/10/25/meet-david-cuartielles-arduino-co-founder-with-a-passion-for-education/
[22] https://people.interactionivrea.org/d.mellis
[23] https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/atmega8
[24] https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-making-of-arduino
[25] https://tigoe.com/
[26] https://web.archive.org/web/20060615141853/https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Credits
[27] https://lwn.net/Articles/637755/
[28] https://blog.arduino.cc/2016/10/01/two-arduinos-become-one-2/
[29] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/03/thermify_heathub_raspberry_pi/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/02/raspberry_pi_not_affected_by_tariff/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/raspberry_pi_os_lmde_debian_13/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/qualcomm_arduino_acquisition/
[33] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
" Qualcomm quietly rewrote the terms of service "
alain williams
Any corporation doing something quietly should generally be taken as an indication of evil intent. With one like Qualcomm doubly so.
But since a lot of the code is GPL or similar they cannot just grab rights which they do not have in the first place. However: other stuff do they surely not have to give due warning so people can remove their content ?
I suspect that a lot of the community will just move elsewhere and let them fester in their own malevolence.
Brothers (or sisters) in arms (and AVRs)
Anonymous Coward
Welcome to Qualcomm, twinned with Broadcom.
Acquire, monetize, trash.
Yuck
Well, as the colortokens guy said, RIP arduino, hello raspberry & esp. I did one thing on an arduino years ago and it was a decent platform. Somehow I stumbled on the RP2040 and now using the faster part for a project. I'd recommend them to anyone who wants off the qualcomm train. The IDE is quite good once you get it installed properly. I'm all raspberry for the IDE. I use a pi4 for the IDE. Of course you always want more. Little more RAM would be good. Haven't tried RISC-V mode yet. Anyone who has, is there an advantage over the ARM mode?