[cattown]

Doesn’t this only really affect actual Arduino brand products. There’s tons of just-as-good cheap knockoffs available. See Elegoo kits easily found on Amazon for example. The IDE is open source with the AGPL license.

Can’t we just cut Qualcomm out of the supply chain and keep going as normal without too much disruption? Doesn’t even feel like a hard fork is needed. Just don’t buy Qualcomm’s crap.

[F7F7F7]

Sounds great in theory. But this would put a serious dent in the Arduino opensource community and fragment support.

Arduino is the unifying umbrella that keeps everything together. With that gone the platform will surely lose.

[andoando]

Esp32 is just as big if not bigger.

[wmf]

The goal is probably to prevent any knockoffs of the next generation products.

[duskwuff]

Not that anyone's even bothered knocking off their current generation products. The majority of Arduino clones are still using AVR or occasionally SAMD processors - Arduino's newer boards were never really accepted by the community. Some makers have even gone another direction entirely - ESP32-based development boards are popular, and there's a compatibility layer for using the Arduino IDE with those.