In all fairness, the Arduino name is itself originally take from the name of a bar in Italy where the project founders used to hang out. Think about how that bar owner would feel about this...
Trademarks are limited to the area of product they apply to. The purpose of trademarks is "identify and distinguish the goods/services of one seller or provider from those of others, and to indicate the source of the goods/services." No one is going to be surprised that those 2 arduinos aren't the same entity, or walk into the bar and wonder why little computers aren't on the menu, so trademark law completely ignores this, and it's extremely common so the bar owner shouldn't feel bad at all.
You can change your name to Barak Obama, and you'll get internet commenters saying things that start with "in all fairness...", but the white house won't be returning your calls.
I still don't understand what kind of standing the Arduino brand stealers (formerly Smart Projects, first manufacturers of Arduino) have to take over the brand worldwide.
Think of it like a terrorist organization occupying a town and them declaring themselves a new country. The original manufacturer has the trademark in their locale. They were also the primary manufacturer of all branded products, and according to the article, had many folks sign a letter where they would agree to only by arduino products from said manufacturer.
That is sort of like holding the town hostage with a bunch of guns.
From the sequence of events it does not seem like this was an "unplanned" event by Arduino SRL. It will be interesting to see what happens next after the Genuino brand starts getting pushed.
> had many folks sign a letter where they would agree to only by arduino products from said manufacturer.
That's really the part I'm stunned about. How did they get leverage to get distributors to sign that? The article said "or pay a fine", how is that legal?
From the article: "Much of 2015 has seen the open-source board maker defending itself from its former manufacturing partner, which recently claimed ownership of the brand, launched its own Arduino product line and website, and has worked to bar distributors from buying Arduino products from other manufacturers."
Smart Projects Srl actually trademarked Arduino back in... 2008 I think? Before the American organization claiming to be the real Arduino even existed, in any case, and they've publicly stated they knew about that trademark all along and chose not to fight it.
At the end of 2008, Gianluca Martino's company, Smart Projects,
registered the Arduino trademark in Italy and kept this a secret from the
other co-founders for about two years. This was revealed when the
Arduino company tried to register the trademark in other areas of the
world (they originally registered only in the US), and discovered that it
was already registered in Italy. Negotiations with Gianluca and his
company to bring the trademark under control of the original Arduino
company were not successful, and in 2014 Smart Projects began refusing to
pay royalties. Smart Projects appointed a new CEO, Mr. Musto, who
renamed the company to Arduino SRL and created a website named
arduino.org, copying the graphics and layout of the original Arduino.cc.
This resulted in a rift in the Arduino development team, and although all
Arduino boards are still available to consumers, and the designs are
open source, the implications of this are uncertain.
I think they should have just chosen some new unique name. "Genuino" is just baking the memory of this schism into their new brand, and comes off as a blatant legal manoeuvre rather than taking the high road and starting over with branding.
arduino.cc has stated that they're not fans of spawn-offs with that suffix:
>Note that while we don't attempt to restrict uses of the "duino" suffix, its use causes the Italians on the team to cringe (apparently it sounds terrible); you might want to avoid it. (It's also trademarked by a Hungarian company.)
Excellent move. Reclaiming the Arduino (soon to be Genuino) movement and also bringing manufacturing to the US. Adafruit has been a great part of the maker movement here, glad to see them participating in this next phase of the Arduino.
