In all fairness both sides seem to have engaged in sleazy behavior throughout the years. To me this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees. Somebody already posted the story of Hernando Barragán so now I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner resellers: http://blog.pimoroni.com/why-we-wont-be-selling-genuino-ardu...

> I'll post some of the strong arm tactics that they (the alleged less sleazy arduino) employ against their partner reseller

When Arduino split Arduino SRL, with the factory in Italy, were the ones with the Arduino trademark in most markets outside the US. Arudino LLC therefor could, presumably, only sell and manufacture device in the US. It seems reasonable that the companies licensed to manufacture Arduino in the US, and can't manufacture anywhere else nor sell to the rest of the world, shouldn't have to compete with Genuinos that are manufactured in China.

In regards to Wiring the project was open source, a master thesis and lives on to this day. It's just that Arduino is more successful.

You can surely doubt the professionalism of many people involved in Arduino, but more than that what happened here is that Arduino forked Wiring and Pimoroni found it cumbersome to sell Arduinos. People always say they want open source or more community driven companies, but when things get complicated not only are people quick to turn on them (which is many times understandable) but they make the situation worse trying to pile on all the things they feel are bad to justify their feelings.

"this whole situation was nothing more than a hizzy fit by Massimo Banzi whose enormous ego won't allow him to see the forest for the trees"

I don't see it that way, especially when you consider how the whole trademark issue went down. And then refusing to pay royalties and strong arming Arduino suppliers. This was not a simple personal disagreement, but overtly hostile and aggressive business moves which hurt the community.

To your point, Hernando Barragán has legitimate grievances, but that was not the main problem that was resolved.

Sleazy offshoot? Could you give me some examples; genuinely curious about it.

There was originally a company called Smart Projects SRL. They manufacture boards. Arduino LLC was the company originally founded for the Arduino project, and Smart Projects SRL manufactured the actual boards for them, because it's owned by one of the Arduino project founders, Gianluca Martino, and they were all friends. That's the backstory.

But when Arduino LLC tried to register the Arduino trademark, it turned out Gianluca Martino had registered the trademark for his own company two years prior, and not told the others. (Arduino LLC got the trademark in the USA, but were not able to register it anywhere else) This happened in 2008. At the time, they just agreed to stay friends and not make a big deal of it.

Then, last year, Smart Projects SRL made a big deal of it. They renamed their company Arduino SRL, registered arduino.org and cut their ties to Arduino LLC. This was reportedly because LLC wanted to start licensing the name to other manufacturers, but SRL wanted to keep official Arduino manufacturing to themselves. This led to the arduino.cc/arduino.org split.

That's pretty sleazy and anti-open source of them if you ask me.

If I remember correctly, Gianluca Martino's trademark registration actually predated the existence of Arduino LLC, because originally there was no company founded for the Arduino project - it was some kind of joint venture between Gianluca Martino (manufacturing, capital) and Massimo Banzi (board design).

For anyone interested in the history of Arduino, definitely read The Untold History of Arduino:

https://arduinohistory.github.io

I think it's really appaling how the original inventor is (not) credited.

One of the more interesting side-effects of this is that, because the Arduino libraries were written by someone else, no-one involved in the project had any experience of porting them to a completely new architecture. As AVR has gradually become slow, outdated and expensive, this has had the result that unofficial Arduino-compatible boards like Teensy are often better ports than the newer official boards.

Here's an article on the topic: https://hackaday.com/2016/03/04/wiring-was-arduino-before-ar...

It's kind of detailed and murky, but I dug up a couple of links to look at: http://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the-...

http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/

For a long while, most people didn't understand the turmoil in the arduino market. The competing arduino.srl tried to fork the ide and even the history of the project.

Here's a direct statement from Banzi Massimo: http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...

My favourite is https://Mbed.org/

You can write code for the devices in the browser and auto-include the C++ classes from other projects.

(or you can do it all offline with GNU tools)