Uh oh. Big trouble in Arduinoland.

[jonnection]

Have you all heard of this ?

http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-arduino/

Apparently one of the originators (Gianluca Martino) of Arduino went and trademarked Arduino in Italy behind the back of the other 4 founders.
He has now cashed out and sold his company to a fortune hunter.

This guy (Federico Musto) has changed his company's name into Arduino S.R.L. , registered Arduino.org website and his team has forked the original Arduino IDE. Arduino SRL (the new 'Arduino') has sued Arduino LLC (the other 4 originators) to stop using the Arduino name. LLC has also countersued SRL.

So now we have two companies (Arduino SRL and Arduino LLC), two websites (Arduino.org and Arduino.cc), and two github repositories that have different Arduino IDE's available for download. Arduino SRL can make 'Arduino' brand boards in Italy, while Arduino LLC can only do so in the US.

It's gonna be one messy and expensive divorce.

[Drakker]

Yeah, but a trademark in Italy is just that, a trademark in Italy. The rest of the world will go on and simply ignore the greedy retards that are trying to pull this off in Italy. Make sure you never buy an Arduino made in Italy and everything will be fine.

[jonnection]

Make sure you never buy an Arduino made in Italy and everything will be fine.

It's not quite that simple. Srl has sued in US to void the trademark Arduino for LLC. They could lose the brand globally, not only in Italy.

SparkFun is still selling a lot of genuine Arduino Unos to unsuspecting customers who want to support Arduino development. Problem is the money goes to Srl, not llc (arduino.cc). It will take time before arduino.cc are able to create new revenue streams and lawsuits are expensive.