Since 2015, Arduino LLC, the company owned by Massimo Banzi and the other three founders (arduino.cc), and Arduino SRL, Italian manufacturers of the original Arduino boards, fought each other in court for the trademark rights. The dispute was created when Arduino LLC (US based) wanted to license board production to other manufacturers globally, and they discovered that the original Italian company had registered the trademark Arduino in Italy, while Arduino was registered in the US by Arduino LLC.
Gianluca Martino, owner of SmartProjects, the manufacturing company making the boards since 2005, also applied for an international Arduino trademark in 2008, trying to protect its activity. In 2014, Gianluca Martino sold part of the company to Italian tech entrepreneur, Federico Musto, who took control, and renamed the company to Arduino Srl. While the Arduino community, lead by the four founders, and Arduino Srl continued its independent activities, it was only until October 2016 that an agreement was reached and the “Arduino” trademark was transferred to a new company.
Federico Musto and the four Arduino LLC owners agreed to form a company called Arduino AG, with Musto keeping 50%, Banzi and the other three founders (BMCI) owning 49%, and Gianluca Martino having 1%. Arduino AG, led by Federico Musto, kept the manufacturing for all the officially branded Arduino boards. A separate not-for-profit “Arduino Foundation” was started to maintain the open-source Arduino desktop IDE, and continue to support the open-source community, offer scholarships, and promote developer initiatives.
It is not clear why Federico Musto accepted to step aside and sell his shares to BMCI, but the revelations by Wired magazine that he fabricated its academic credentials - pretending to holding a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA from New York University - might have something to do with it.
Whatever the reason might be, the announcement of the acquisition of Arduino AG by BCMI - controlled by the four Arduino co-founders Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe, together with Fabio Violante and Moviri S.p.A. - with Massimo Banzi becoming the new Chairman and CTO of "the new" Arduino, and Fabio Violante appointed as the new CEO, is truly an historical moment for anyone that follows the project since its inception, and basically for all members of the Arduino community.
As Massimo Banzi states in the announcement, "This is the beginning of a new era for Arduino in which we will strengthen and renew our commitment to open source hardware and software, while in parallel setting the company on a sound financial course of sustainable growth. Our vision remains to continue to enable anybody to innovate with electronics for a long time to come.”
“I’m really excited and honored to join Massimo, the co-founders and the amazing Arduino team as CEO. In the past two years we have worked very hard to get to this point. We envision a future in which Arduino will apply its winning recipe to democratize the Internet of Things for individuals, educators, professionals and businesses,” says Fabio Violante.
Arduino was the first widespread Open Source Hardware development platform. Since the project’s foundation many new development boards and software libraries have been introduced, and the ease-of-use of the project lead to mass adoption of microcontroller-based electronics. Arduino is now the world’s leading open-source hardware and software ecosystem, with a complete range of software tools, hardware platforms and documentation enabling almost anybody to be creative with technology.
www.arduino.cc
