After a long and heated dispute between the two original parts of the Arduino world, that resulted in the Arduino and Genuino brands being confusingly used in different parts of the world, everything is back to normal or even better than before.

Arduino started out in 2005 as a project for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and the board took its name from a bar in Ivrea, where some of the founders of the project used to meet. In 2009  Arduino LLC, was set up in the USA by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe and Gianluca Martino and is the proprietor of the trademark Arduino.

In 2014 however, Gianluca Martino whose Italian company Smart Projects SRL has been the principal manufacturer of Arduino boards renamed his company Arduino SRL (a designation meaning private limited company) and took on Federico Musto, formerly CEO of Dog Hunter, an Internet of Things company that had previously contributed to Yun, as its CEO. 

Two lawsuits, one in US and the other in Italy, are underway to resolve the dispute over the ownership of the trademark and the legitimacy of its use.

Now at the New York Maker Fair it has been announced that the dispute is over. 

At the end of 2016, the newly created “Arduino Holding” will become the single point of contact for the wholesale distribution of all current and future products, and will continue to bring tremendous innovations to the market.

In addition, Arduino will form a not-for-profit “Arduino Foundation” responsible for maintaining the open-source Arduino desktop IDE, and continuing to foster the open-source movement by providing support for a variety of scholarships, community and developer initiatives.

Massimo Banzi, Co-Founder of Arduino LLC, commented, “Today is one of the best days in Arduino history. This allows us to start a new course for Arduino made of constructive dialogue and disruptive innovation in the education, Makers and IoT fields. The Arduino Foundation will allow us to champion the core values of the Arduino Community within the open-source ecosystem and to make our commitment to open-source stronger than ever. This is really a new beginning for Arduino!”

“Of course, we are thrilled to resolve the issues that have taken place over the past couple of years, and the team is working together to continue to offer the best open hardware and software,” said Federico Musto, CEO & President of Arduino Srl. “We know how passionate our partners and developers are about Arduino, and the growth and loyalty has been astonishing. Arduino developers will continue to see amazing technical developments including NFC, BLE, voice controls, and more, to fuel the IoT growth and other innovations.”

Great news and perhaps now things will be easier for Arduino distributors who have had to avoid selling the two brands - Arduino and Genuino - to the wrong parts of the world,  forcing them to keep stocks of both. Let's hope that the two different versions of the Arduino IDE can now be merged. 

More Information

TWO ARDUINOS BECOME ONE

Related Articles

Arduino IDE Gets Update 

Win New Arduino MKR1000 

Arduino Zero Pro Released Amid Legal Dispute

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Linkedin. 

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info