Federico Musto has stepped down as Arduino CEO

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/01/federico-musto-is-out-as-arduino-ceo/

by tdrnd • 9 years ago

51 28 9 years ago

EGreg2• 9 years ago

I thought everyone there already suspected he was the CEO? But I'm glad he finally came out with it. Must have taken some courage!

austenallred• 9 years ago

I genuinely can't tell if you're serious or not

EGreg2• 9 years ago

Nope, it was a joke responding to the title itself only.

dovdovdov2• 9 years ago

Doing business in open-source is hard.

I never really fancied Arduino as a business, then came the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I found my true love.

icebraining• 9 years ago

Arduino had the advantage of being open source from the components up - you could make your own boards, and many did. Unfortunately, it seems that more recent models like the Yùn have broken that promise: http://www.wifi4things.com/arduino-yun-what-is-under-the-hoo...

rekado• 9 years ago

The Atmel chip design is not a free hardware design, though. There actually are chips whose design is libre, such as the Parallax Propeller (under GPL.)

_b8r03• 9 years ago

The Raspberry Pi Foundation are not an open source organisation. They produce some open source software (I can't even find coherent source for the pixel desktop), but all of their boards are closed source.

detaro• 9 years ago

What do you prefer about the Raspberry Pi Foundation?

dovdovdov2• 9 years ago

What I actually meant that I switched platforms...

the-dude• 9 years ago

I am confused : is this the evil Arduino or the non-evil one?

wastedhours• 9 years ago

I thought they were back to being the same thing again?

_b8r03• 9 years ago

It's not really evil as such. It's more the intersection of money and greed.

Musto has lied about a lot of things (some more bizarre than others), and clearly gives zero thoughts about the community side of things. Banzi and co have also some interesting history when it comes to acknowledgement of Arduino's history, especially in relation to the original wiring project and processing.

There isn't really an evil or non-evil Arduino. The original Arduino is a modification to Hernando Barragan's Wiring board to support the Atmega8 chipset. Banzi was Barragan's supervisor. Banzi and a bunch of other guys at IDII forked the project (for reasons Barragan says he doesn't know) and founded Arduino, eventually building the Uno, still based on the Wiring board.

The Nano and Pro Mini followed, and when Arduino realised there was money to be made, proceeded to fall out with each other.

Now we're in a situation where both Arduino orgs are claiming to be open source, but only some products are open source. Deals have been made with companies that will only ever provide binary blobs and require NDAs that mean that there are Arduino products out there that will never be open source hardware.

If Arduino was to turn around and say, "Hey guys, the Arduino Uno, Nano and Pro Mini are open source. The Yun, ARM boards and others aren't", I think people would understand. Instead, Arduino uses ambiguity to hide it's open source status.

There's huge sums of money at stake, and that's what's driving it. The push from Maker Magazine and Adafruit may have put pressure on Musto to step down (or not), but it's not like Adafruit don't have their own competing boards, which makes it a little difficult for Adafruit to get too close without facing possible accusations of competitive badmouthing.

makomk2• 9 years ago

The push from Adafruit at least seemed rather bizarre and cynical to me. All of a sudden, they started caring about the open-source status of hardware that predated the Arduino split and using it as justification for why Musto was evil and needed to go. This wasn't something they'd cared about before. Indeed, when Bre Pettis and Makerbot went against their loudly-proclaimed principles and took their 3D printers (which borrowed heavily from other's open designs) closed source while hiding behind vague statements, Adafruit's response was to post a piece that compared the people who criticised Makerbot to "fundamentalists" who "blow things up" and claimed to be defending "open source innovation and polite disagreement" by doing so: https://blog.adafruit.com/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-sour...

Honestly, ever since the Makerbot fiasco it's increasingly felt like the main principle in open hardware is what makes the right clique of insiders most money, and this hasn't done much to change my opinion on that.

erikb3• 9 years ago

TL;DR major shareholders want to make profit, therefore found a way to kick out visionary CEO to replace with MBA/financial CEO. Without a publicliy valid reason they just complained about the CV, a document which barely ever is 100% honest. But since the old CEO doesn't seem to make a fuss of it, the severance package probably was good enough.

mikeash• 9 years ago

The guy claimed to have a PhD from MIT and an MBA from NYU, when he never even went to either school. Are you defending that on the basis that everyone lies on their resume?

wolfgke3• 9 years ago

Without a publicliy valid reason they just complained about the CV, a document which barely ever is 100% honest.

At least in Germany lying in the CV is considered as a very serious issue. What you called "barely 100% correct" would thus probably be called "fraud" in Germany.

erikb3• 9 years ago

Can you be more specific? This is the first time I hear someone say that. I'm educated to individually write CVs for each company related to what they need. I never needed to provide any proof either.

totalZero• 9 years ago

If I were a potential employer and I found out that you posted something saying that dishonest CV writing is a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon, I would never hire you..... maybe you should not leave this comment up, if there's a chance that people in your professional sphere know your HN username. Just my suggestion.

ptorrone2• 9 years ago

"visionary CEO" ? here is an overview.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2017/08/02/arduino-federico-musto-...

feederico• 9 years ago

I wonder what was the amount on the check, given that he claimed the business could grow from 15 to 50M https://www.open-electronics.org/from-arduino-to-genuino-the...

Even if 50M was a bold one, I wouldn't have sold 50% of the company for less than 20M.

I fear Arduino is gonna pay a mortgage for a long time, mining its ability to innovate.

Federico Musto has stepped down as Arduino CEO

Related Stories