Arduino’s new terms of service worries hobbyists ahead of Qualcomm acquisition

Some members of the maker community are distraught about Arduino’s new terms of service (ToS), saying that the added rules put the company’s open source DNA at risk.

Arduino updated its ToS and privacy policy this month, which is about a month after Qualcomm announced that it’s acquiring the open source hardware and software company. Among the most controversial changes is this addition:

User shall not:

• translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements …

In response to concerns from some members of the maker community, including from open source hardware distributor and manufacturer Adafruit, Arduino posted a blog on Friday. Regarding the new reverse-engineering rule, Arduino’s blog said:

Any hardware, software or services (e.g. Arduino IDE, hardware schematics, tooling and libraries) released with Open Source licenses remain available as before. Restrictions on reverse-engineering apply specifically to our Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. Anything that was open, stays open.

But Adafruit founder and engineer Limor Fried and Adafruit managing editor Phillip Torrone are not convinced. They told Ars Technica that Arduino’s blog leaves many questions unanswered and said that they’ve sent these questions to Arduino without response.

“Why is reverse-engineering prohibited at all for a company built on openly hackable systems?” Fried and Torrone asked in a shared statement.

When contacted by Ars Technica for further comment on why Arduino made this change, representatives from Arduino and Qualcomm referred us to Arduino’s blog.

User monitoring

Among other changes to Adruino’s ToS is a new section on “AI Policy” that reads: “Arduino reserves the right to monitor User accounts and use of the AI Products, including but not limited to usage of features and functions, compute time, and storage…”

Fried and Torrone told Ars that Arduino has failed to address “what data from these AI systems is retained, who has access, and why is this collection opt-out only by not using the features.”

The Adafruit executives also expressed trepidation about how data Arduino has on users might be shared with Qualcomm.