Arduino CEO: We will always be open source

Qualcomm acquisition won’t alter our mission, says Fabio Volante

In October last year, US chip giant Qualcomm acquired Italian open source electronics and software pioneer Arduino. Not everyone was happy.

For Qualcomm, adding Arduino to its roster along with earlier purchases Foundries.io, Edge Impulse (and a later addition, Augentix) makes perfect sense as it seeks to expand its presence in the IoT and robotics, tapping into the open source communities driving innovation in those areas. “We are accelerating our vision to democratise access to our leading‑edge AI and computing products for the global developer community,” said Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s group general manager, automotive, industrial and embedded IoT, at the time.

But when small (or even large) open-source players are snapped up by giants, positive sentiment does not always flow both ways, sometimes with good reason. Many in the Red Hat developer community unhappy about its sale to IBM, felt justified in their suspicions when CentOS, a popular downstream rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, was abruptly terminated.

Qualcomm has not been seen historically as sympathetic to open source, resisting the creation of independent drivers for its mobile chips, so it’s understandable that supporters of Arduino, a non-profit founded 20 years ago with an educational remit, might be suspicious of its motives. Indeed, posts on social media have pointed to changes in Arduino’s Ts&Cs that could be interpreted as giving more control over contributions to the company, with others speculating that Qualcomm may be working on a “buy and kill” strategy.

Computing put some of these points to Arduino CEO, Fabio Volante, when we spoke to him in December. The interview is edited for brevity.

Can you tell us about your thinking around the acquisition?

Fabio Volante.Absolutely. So the point of this acquisition is basically augmentation of our capabilities. Is not by any means changing what Arduino is and what Arduino is going to be.

In the past few years, we’ve noted that a lot of our community members were integrating more and more AI into their projects, and there were wires everywhere just to do a small robotics application. So we started working with Qualcomm, because Qualcomm was a very nice fit in terms of low power consumption compute and powerful computing with the AI acceleration, even at the lower end of the spectrum of their products. So independently from the acquisition, we started working with Qualcomm and found a lot of synergies, because we wanted to democratise this space of edge AI, working on the hardware side and also on the software side.

The first fruit of the partnership was Uno Q board. Tell us about that.

Uno Q has the same shape and form factor of the Arduino Uno, our flagship product, but it has a dual brain architecture. So basically, there is, on one side of the board, a microprocessor. It's a quad-core Cortex a53 running at 2 gigahertz. And on the other side there is a STMicroelectronics microcontroller that is suitable for real-time tasks. The combination of the two is interesting because we’ve created a bridge between the two parts of the architecture.

So, users can create high-level software in Python on the microprocessor that is running containers and Linux, but we try to hide all this complexity in our development environment. And if they need to interact with sensors or motors, they can call some function of the microcontroller, and in five minutes get to control a model and maybe apply machine vision to tell the model where to go. On the bottom of this device there are two high density connectors that allow you to do multimedia applications; for example, connecting multiple cameras to the to the board for machine vision applications, or high-quality digital audio. So, the Uno Q is a dual brain architecture with a lot of nuances there that make it a very compact, very inexpensive and affordable device for people that are approaching physical computing and AI.

Do you compete with companies like Raspberry Pi?

There’s a perception that we compete but there are substantial differences. Raspberry Pi has never been an open source company; they also have an exclusive processor family that is not available on the market. They're focused on computing, providing an affordable computing platform, whereas what we try to do with Arduino is to create more physical computing devices, combining a physical element with a computing element. Of course, now the platform is becoming so flexible that you can even use it as a computer, so it's inevitable that there is an overlap.

Can you speak about the community reaction to the Qualcomm deal, and how you're addressing any fears they might have?

The point of this acquisition is augmentation of our capabilities. It’s not by any means changing what Arduino is and what Arduino is going to be.

We release everything as open source, and we will continue releasing everything as open source. Everyone can go to our website, click on the link with all the Gerber files for producing the PCB and create their own Arduino block; everything is licensed with the usual Arduino licences.

This is a change for a company like Qualcomm, but it's a change that started a few years ago. There is a big effort in creating open source stack and opening up, for example, there is a strong commitment from the leadership team at Qualcomm to provide more developer friendly Linux distribution. They look at Arduino as a transformation agent for Qualcomm to adapt to the new reality of community development.

For us, we remain an independent subsidiary. We keep being what we were before, but we have more energy, more scale, more research and development possibilities, more access to CPU. Of course, you cannot go to the community and just tell them that we are going to be open, and have them believe you just because I said as CEO we’re going to be open, but we are leading by execution and by example.

We are just releasing everything as open source. For example, we’ve created App Lab, a new framework for simplifying the use of AI for people that don't have a PhD in computer science, and App Lab is completely open source. There is total clarity around the fact that we will keep this mission of being open. We are working already on new designs that will be completely open.

What about the fear in the community about other changes that might change the relationship between Arduino and innovators?

There is no advantage for a company like Qualcomm to just stop this thing. They acquired Arduino to get access to a much broader audience of innovators, and the spirit of these innovators has been always pretty clear. So that they can contribute, we provide a lot of technology, and they want to keep this this way.

Of course, Qualcomm is a gigantic company. People are scared because it's a gigantic company, but it's really genuinely interested in keeping the spirit and learning from our community, rather than changing the community or the way we work.

Also, we are going to work with all silicon vendors. That's unprecedented in something like this. So we work with SDMicro, we work with Microchip, with all these people that we used to work with.

[Asked after the interview about the changes to Arduino’s Ts&Cs that led to some of the community unease, the company forwarded this blog post].

Will you be venturing into RISC-V hardware?

When it comes to open source and RISC-V hardware, the market is evolving rapidly, especially because this type of processor architecture is widely used in Asia.

We don’t have in our product line a pure RISC-V play. The majority of our products were based on Arm Cortex architectures, because they are more standard from the toolchain perspective, easier for people to use. But we've been always open from this point of view. So we will embrace, probably, the next generation of processor. They will come with new architecture. We normally try to cherry pick our battles. If there is value in something that we see on the market, we normally embrace it.