It is not that Qualcomm doesn’t make great semiconductors, and the first Arduino under the new leadership – Uno Q ** – is a very interesting new product and a great concept.
It is because Qualcomm is very different from Arduino, and has a history of being extremely litigious.
Sure enough, Arduino terms and conditions have changed, and some of the changes seem to reach out for wide powers and ownership over…. well, I am not sure over what, as there are some oddly vague phrases in there.
Luckily, the folks at Adafruit know more than me.
Adafruit is a major contributor to the Arduino ecosystem, both with hardware and software – plenty of de-facto Arduino libraries started life at Adafruit.
So I will keep quiet now and hand you over to this initial Adafruit blog, and this Adafruit blog, which will take you on to a blog by the Molecularist.
Qualcomm has issued some clarification which did not put all worries to rest, and I have been told that Adafruit, or its CEO Ladyada, has said more on the subject since the blogs above (frustratingly, I can find neither the clarification nor the further Adafruit posting today, so no links to them yet).
I am just a low-level Arduino user, for test gear and simple controllers, so my personal fear is just a draconian user agreement next time a new Arduino IDE is available for download, or the IDE becoming web-only.
** On a very positive note about the Uno Q, I have a feeling that this will be the perfect platform for ad-hoc test gear because the Linux processor can effortlessly handle a proper graphical display for human interface, leaving the real-time processor to do measurement or waveform generation. Before this, it took an HMI magician like upir for anything beyond a 16×2 alphanumeric (or simple oled) display on an Arduino.
