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.
Comments
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.
Yes, I saw that, but does "manufacturing partner" mean "factory"?
Pretty much, yes.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino#Legal_dispute
Oh wow, that's super dodgy.