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3

Recently I have noticed that there are two arduino sites, arduino.cc and arduino.org. They both have the Arduino logo and both sell what seems to be official Arduino boards. Also, arduino.org came out with the Arduino Zero board first. What is the deal here? Has Arduino partnered with another site? Any ideas appreciated.

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up vote 15 down vote accepted

The short of it is that there was a falling out within the Arduino people and now there are two groups laying claim to the "Arduino" name.

Arduino LLC runs arduino.cc. They are the steward of the Arduino IDE and libraries and own the "Arduino" trademark outside of Italy. Arduino SRL (fka Smart Projects SRL) is the company that assembles(assembled) the majority of Arduino boards for Arduino LLC, runs arduino.org, and owns the "Arduino" trademark inside Italy.

Arduino SRL recently decided that they are no longer beholden to Arduino LLC and has stopped paying licensing fees for using the Arduino name. Whether this is justified or not has not been fully tested in court yet.

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4  
Story morality: don't make business with your friends, or do it properly, as you would with anybody else. Sad but true. – jfpoilpret May 14 '15 at 12:33
2  
This is a sum up from Massimo Banzi: makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino – Federico Fissore May 14 '15 at 12:46
3  
"are the creator of the Arduino IDE" is too kind, and not quite factual. They are the original people who took Wiring project, marketed it better, then pretended like Wiring never existed. Of course the Wiring people did the same from the Processing project for the IDE. – user6569 May 14 '15 at 13:30
up vote 7 down vote

This article can explain it better than I could paraphrase: http://hackaday.com/2015/02/25/arduino-v-arduino/

Relevant excerpt:

Arduino LLC [arduino.cc] is the company founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe and Gianluca Martino in 2009 and is the owner of the Arduino trademark and gave us the designs, software, and community support that’s gotten the Arduino where it is. The boards were manufactured by a spinoff company, Smart Projects Srl, founded by the same Gianluca Martino. So far, so good.

Things got ugly in November when Martino ... renamed Smart Projects to Arduino Srl and registered arduino.org

According to this Italian Wired article, the cause of the split is that Banzi and the other three wanted to internationalize the brand and license production to other firms freely, while Martino ... [wanted] to list on the stock market and keep all production strictly in the Italian factory.

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up vote -2 down vote

arduino.org is not only boards assembler, but is also who designs and engineers the arduino boards. They own the arduino trademark all over the world, except the USA, therefore arduino.cc owns the trademark only in the USA.

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No; arduino.cc designs the boards and owns the tradmark everywhere except Italy. arduino.org justmanufactures the boards (and owns the trademark in Italy) and recently forked Arduino's GitHub repo, registered the domain arduino.org, and is now pretending that they are the only ones who design and make Arduinos and that arduino.cc is an impostor. – NobodyNada Dec 20 '15 at 17:50
    
@NobodyNada I'm sorry but you are wrong about the boards manufacturing. arduino srl or arduino.org came from Smart Projects, and Smart Projects is the company who always designs and engineers arduino boards. – Thomas Celeron Jan 5 at 12:12
    
.org owns the trademark all over the world except USA, just take a look at arduino.cc web site and you can see Arduino Only USA and Genuino Outside USA. I never heard that arduino.org said that .cc is an impostor on the contrary .org always thanks to arudino project founders for their work. often people see only what they want to see and say things influencing people. (sorry for this last non-technical line but I have read around the web a lot of things that are untrue and unfounded accusations) – Thomas Celeron Jan 5 at 12:27

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