Arduino has a new job selling chips for its new owner Lets not pretend otherwise

Opinion The successful, sector-defining, open source Italian embedded platform provider Arduino had a little bash in Turin recently. It made a few announcements, including a new single-board computer (SBC) with a Qualcomm system on a chip (SoC). Oh, and that it had been bought by American dragon-themed mobile chip monster Qualcomm in a deal with total fealty (WTF).

Qualcomm says its partnership with Arduino will make it more accessible to developers, and make its technologies more easily available to the edge. Which is true enough, up to a point.

A lot of cheap dev boards and Qualcomm-flavored software tools will certainly give the company access to entire sectors previously excluded. Qualcomm hitherto only talked to big old companies who'd sign big old contracts with big old secrets. Now Qualcomm silicon and software can get into the hands of individuals, educators and inventive start-ups. That's where the future comes from, especially where the better sort of AI fertilizes the better sort of robotics.

Most robots are edge devices. Qualcomm needs to be there.

This sort of thinking qualifies as enlightenment from such a secretive corporate monolith. Except for one thing: Qualcomm is not in partnership with Arduino. It owns Arduino. It says Arduino will remain independent from the main company, and nothing will change that. This cannot be true.

The way to have a partnership with Arduino that guarantees the freedom to make its own choices and maintain its existing strategies is to have a partnership that does these things. If you buy something, you control it. That's rather the point. If you want to support an open source hardware and software platform, contribute open source hardware and software. A partnership can be dissolved by either partner, and this is not the case here. If Arduino wants to do something Qualcomm does not like, only one will win, and it begins with the letter Q.

To see what a difference this can make, look at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It uses Broadcom silicon for the SoCs in all its main SBCs. That means it has to ship closed firmware, because Broadcom dislikes sharing information as much as Qualcomm does. Yet Raspberry Pi is seen as an exemplar of an enabling, independent, user-focused and dev-focused platform. Not perfect, but the organization has put in hard years of building and supporting the software, education, and continuity which powers that remarkable, unique ecosystem.

Qualcomm could have done the same. It could have said it was producing SBCs with Arduino, was committing to collaborate on OS and promotion around a shared vision of enabling new accessible technologies to new markets. That's what the slick marketing is trying to imply. To reiterate: it did not do that. Qualcomm bought Arduino. And it can no more handwave away the implications for the future than if Broadcom had taken control of all things Pi.

It honestly doesn't matter what arguments are made that things really will continue as before, nor that it's in Qualcomm's best interests to cultivate the open source, massively diverse ethos of the existing Arduino universe. Nor that all this is just too big and well established, too well protected by permissive licensing, too embedded in the fabric of the world to change. Qualcomm paid good money to own that soul – how much good money, we don't know. Nobody's going to tell us anything if they can help it.

Qualcomm is here to chew gum and sell chips, and it's all out of gum. The Arduino purchase is there to sell chips. It may be part of a long-term strategy that's nicely aligned with what Arduino's done so far, but if that alignment changes then Arduino becomes a brand that does its master's bidding. Qualcomm is a publicly traded company, and the moment that internal and shareholder sentiment turns against Arduino adding shareholder value? That's it. Same if Arduino goes so well that it becomes part of internal turf wars, or does so poorly that it's left on the midwinter rooftop.

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The archaeology of the corporate world is full of the empty husks of acquired companies bought for nominally strategic reasons only to wither and die the moment strategy changed. You keep your independence in corporates to the extent that you have powerful sponsors and internal allies. The newly acquired rarely have either.

That's before getting into the weeds of corporate culture, of world views and values so incompatible that those who are bought discover they need to get out at the same time that their new management comes to the same conclusion. You can dissolve partnerships when that happens – see Microsoft and IBM – but you can't dissolve acquisitions. You can only destroy.

It is very, very unlikely that by 2030, the name Arduino will not stand for what it stands for now. Qualcomm will consume it. Whether Qualcomm gets prominence in new sectors in return, is unknowable. That Arduino's legacy will continue independently of Qualcomm is far more likely, because open source is adept at shape-shifting.

There will be a great open source hardware and software microcontroller platform, but what will it be called? Ar du I no?