[paulgerhardt]

Many years ago we worked on releasing an Arduino compatible design.

To do so we had to:

1) Release the board files - fine.

2) Open source the code - ok.

3) Pay the foundation 20% of our retail profit - ~record scratch~ - not going to happen.

There is not enough margin in retail to justify asking for a $40 license per chip for a $5 hardware part. The Arduino compatible initiative was dropped and we built on bare metal instead.

Other Maker boards have some leverage here (Raspberry Pi, Next Thing Co, Electric Imp) because they have control of an exclusive chip supply. Arduino being a clone of the Wiring SDK + an off the shelf chip on a break out board never got to exercise their position effectively in the enterprise / mass market consumer electronics space.

Analogously the Apple ][ started as a development platform for hobbyists that became the business workhorse with VisiCalc. Arduino never left the hobbyist space and scared off a lot of legitimately interested businesses with the ambiguous licensing terms and Genuino debacle.

[Animats]

The previous poster's point is that if you can cram your problem into the limited resources of an Arduino, with its small ATMega CPU and very limited memory, it's not a big jump to a custom board for your low-cost product. Anyone can buy an ATMEGA328 CPU, the low-end Arduino processor. $1.78 from DigiKey; $1.27 at Seeed. No royalties.

[paulgerhardt]

Sure, getting your program to run on an Arduino is 90% of the work. Getting it from Arduino to production is the other 90%.

[randyrand]

You don't have to do #3. At least many people don't and they don't seem to be enforcing it.

[EpicEng]

I'm not sure our legal department would buy that argument