A trademark battle in the Arduino community

   The Arduino has been one of the biggest success stories of the
   open-hardware movement, but that success does not protect it from internal
   conflict. In recent months, two of the project's founders have come into
   conflict about the direction of future efforts—and that conflict has
   turned into a legal dispute about who owns the rights to the Arduino
   trademark.

   The current fight is a battle between two companies that both bear the
   Arduino name: Arduino LLC and Arduino SRL. The disagreements that led to
   present state of affairs go back a bit further.

   The Arduino project grew out of 2005-era course work taught at the
   Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Ivrea, Italy (using
   Processing, Wiring, and pre-existing microcontroller hardware). After the
   IDII program was discontinued, the open-hardware Arduino project as we
   know it was launched by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, and David Mellis
   (who had worked together at IDII), with co-founders Tom Igoe and Gianluca
   Martino joining shortly afterward. The project released open hardware
   designs (including full schematics and design files) as well as the
   microcontroller software to run on the boards and the desktop IDE needed
   to program it.

   Arduino LLC was incorporated in 2008 by Banzi, Cuartielles, Mellis, Igoe,
   and Martino. The company is registered in the United States, and it has
   continued to design the Arduino product line, develop the software, and
   run the Arduino community site. The hardware devices themselves, however,
   were manufactured by a separate company, "Smart Projects SRL," that was
   founded by Martino. "SRL" is essentially the Italian equivalent of
   "LLC"—Smart Projects was incorporated in Italy.

   This division of responsibilities—with the main Arduino project handling
   everything except for board manufacturing—may seem like an odd one, but it
   is consistent with Arduino's marketing story. From its earliest days, the
   designs for the hardware have been freely available, and outside companies
   were allowed to make Arduino-compatible devices. The project has long run
   a certification program for third-party manufacturers interested in using
   the "Arduino" branding, but allows (and arguably even encourages) informal
   software and firmware compatibility.

   The Arduino branding was not formally registered as a trademark in the
   early days, however. Arduino LLC filed to register the US trademark in
   April 2009, and it was granted in 2011.

   At this point, the exact events begin to be harder to verify, but the
   original group of founders reportedly had a difference of opinion about
   how to license out hardware production rights to other companies. Wired
   Italy reports that Martino and Smart Projects resisted the other four
   founders' plans to "internationalize" production—although it is not clear
   if that meant that Smart Projects disapproved of licensing out any
   official hardware manufacturing to other companies, or had some other
   concern. Heise Online adds that the conflict seemed to be about moving
   some production to China.

   What is clear is that Smart Projects filed a petition with the US Patent
   and Trademark Office (USPTO) in October 2014 asking the USPTO to cancel
   Arduino LLC's trademark on "Arduino." Then, in November 2014, Smart
   Projects changed its company's name to Arduino SRL. Somewhere around that
   time, Martino sold off his ownership stake in Smart Projects SRL and new
   owner Federico Musto was named CEO.

   Unsurprisingly, Arduino LLC did not care for the petition to the USPTO
   and, in January 2015, the company filed a trademark-infringement lawsuit
   against Arduino SRL. Confusing matters further, the re-branded Arduino SRL
   has set up its own web site using the domain name arduino.org, which
   duplicates most of the site features found on the original Arduino site
   (arduino.cc). That includes both a hardware store and software downloads.

   Musto, the new CEO of the company now called Arduino SRL, has a bit of a
   history with Arduino as well. His other manufacturing business had
   collaborated with Arduino LLC on the design and production of the Arduino
   Yún, which has received some criticism for including proprietary
   components.

   Hackaday has run a two-part series (in February and March) digging into
   the ins and outs of the dispute, including the suggestion that Arduino
   LLC's recent release of version 1.6.0 of the Arduino IDE was a move
   intended to block Arduino SRL from hijacking IDE development. Commenter
   Paul Stoffregen (who was the author of the Heise story above) noted that
   Arduino SRL recently created a fork of the Arduino IDE on GitHub.

   Most recently, Banzi broke his silence about the dispute in a story
   published at MAKEzine. There, Banzi claims that Martino secretly filed a
   trademark application on "Arduino" in Italy in 2008 and told none of the
   other Arduino founders. He also details a series of unpleasant
   negotiations between the companies, including Smart Projects stopping the
   royalty payments it had long sent to Arduino LLC for manufacturing devices
   and re-branding its boards with the Arduino.org URL.

   Users appear to be stuck in the middle. Banzi says that several retail
   outlets that claim to be selling "official" Arduino boards are actually
   paying Arduino SRL, not Arduino LLC, but it is quite difficult to
   determine which retailers are lined up on which side, since there are
   (typically) several levels of supplier involved. The two Arduino
   companies' web sites also disagree about the available hardware, with
   Arduino.org offering the new Arduino Zero model for sale today and
   Arduino.cc listing it as "Coming soon."

   Furthermore, as Hackaday's March story explains, the recently-released
   Arduino.cc IDE now reports that boards manufactured by Arduino SRL are
   "uncertified." That warning does not prevent users from programming the
   other company's hardware, but it will no doubt confuse quite a few users
   who believe they possess genuine Arduino-manufactured devices.

   The USPTO page for Arduino SRL's petition notes pre-trial disclosure dates
   have been set for August and October of 2015 (for Arduino SRL and Arduino
   LLC, respectively), which suggests that this debate is far from over. Of
   course, it is always disappointing to observe a falling out between
   project founders, particularly when the project in question has had such
   an impact on open-source software and open hardware.

   One could argue that disputes of this sort are proof that even small
   projects started among friends need to take legal and
   intellectual-property issues (such as trademarks) seriously from the very
   beginning—perhaps Arduino and Smart Projects thought that an informal
   agreement was all that was necessary in the early days, after all.

   But, perhaps, once a project becomes profitable, there is simply no way to
   predict what might happen. Arduino LLC would seem to have a strong case
   for continual and rigorous use of the "Arduino" trademark, which is the
   salient point in US trademark law. It could still be a while before the
   courts rule on either side of that question, however.

   Comments (5 posted)

Mapping and data mining with QGIS 2.8

   By Nathan Willis
   March 25, 2015

   QGIS is a free-software geographic information system (GIS) tool; it
   provides a unified interface in which users can import, edit, and analyze
   geographic-oriented information, and it can produce output as varied as
   printable maps or map-based web services. The project recently made its
   first update to be designated a long-term release (LTR), and that release
   is both poised for high-end usage and friendly to newcomers alike.

   The new release is version 2.8, which was unveiled on March 2. An official
   change log is available on the QGIS site, while the release itself was
   announced primarily through blog posts (such as this post by Anita Graser
   of the project's steering committee). Downloads are available for a
   variety of platforms, including packages for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora,
   openSUSE, and several other distributions.

   [QGIS main interface]

   As the name might suggest, QGIS is a Qt application; the latest release
   will, in fact, build on both Qt4 and Qt5, although the binaries released
   by the project come only in Qt4 form at present. 2.8 has been labeled a
   long-term release (LTR)—which, in this case, means that the project has
   committed to providing backported bug fixes for one full calendar year,
   and that the 2.8.x series is in permanent feature freeze. The goal,
   according to the change log, is to provide a stable version suitable for
   businesses and deployments in other large organizations. The change log
   itself points out that the development of quite a few new features was
   underwritten by various GIS companies or university groups, which suggests
   that taking care of these organizations' needs is reaping dividends for
   the project.

   For those new to QGIS (or GIS in general), there is a detailed new-user
   tutorial that provides a thorough walk-through of the data-manipulation,
   mapping, and analysis functions. Being a new user, I went through the
   tutorial; although there are a handful of minor differences between QGIS
   2.8 and the version used in the text (primarily whether specific features
   were accessed through a toolbar or right-click menu), on the whole it is
   well worth the time.

   QGIS is designed to make short work of importing spatially oriented data
   sets, mining information from them, and turning the results into a
   meaningful visualization. Technically speaking, the visualization output
   is optional: one could simply extract the needed statistics and results
   and use them to answer some question or, perhaps, publish the massaged
   data set as a database for others to use.

   But well-made maps are often the easiest way to illuminate facts about
   populations, political regions, geography, and many other topics when
   human comprehension is the goal. QGIS makes importing data from databases,
   web-mapping services (WMS), and even unwieldy flat-file data dumps a
   painless experience. It handles converting between a variety of
   map-referencing systems more or less automatically, and allows the user to
   focus on finding the useful attributes of the data sets and rendering them
   on screen.

    Here be data

   The significant changes in QGIS 2.8 fall into several categories. There
   are updates to how QGIS handles the mathematical expressions and queries
   users can use to filter information out of a data set, improvements to the
   tools used to explore the on-screen map canvas, and enhancements to the
   "map composer" used to produce visual output. This is on top of plenty of
   other under-the-hood improvements, naturally.

   [QGIS query builder]

   In the first category are several updates to the filtering tools used to
   mine a data set. Generally speaking, each independent data set is added to
   a QGIS project as its own layer, then transformed with filters to focus in
   on a specific portion of the original data. For instance, the land-usage
   statistics for a region might be one layer, while roads and buildings for
   the same region from OpenStreetMap might be two additional layers. Such
   filters can be created in several ways: there is a "query builder" that
   lets the user construct and test expressions on a data layer, then save
   the results, an SQL console for performing similar queries on a database,
   and spreadsheet-like editing tools for working directly on data tables.

   All three have been improved in this release. New are support for
   if(condition, true, false) conditional statements, a set of operations for
   geometry primitives (e.g., to test whether regions overlap or lines
   intersect), and an "integer divide" operation. Users can also add comments
   to their queries to annotate their code, and there is a new custom
   function editor for writing Python functions that can be called in
   mathematical expressions within the query builder.

   It is also now possible to select only some rows in a table, then perform
   calculations just on the selection—previously, users would have to extract
   the rows of interest into a new table first. Similarly, in the SQL editor,
   the user can highlight a subset of the SQL query and execute it
   separately, which is no doubt helpful for debugging.

   There have also been several improvements to the Python and Processing
   plugins. Users can now drag-and-drop Python scripts onto QGIS and they
   will be run automatically. Several new analysis algorithms are now
   available through the Processing interface that were previously
   Python-only; they include algorithms for generating grids of points or
   vectors within a region, splitting layers and lines, generating
   hypsometric curves, refactoring data sets, and more.

    Maps in, maps out

   [QGIS simplify tool]

   The process of working with on-screen map data picked up some improvements
   in the new release as well. Perhaps the most fundamental is that each map
   layer added to the canvas is now handled in its own thread, so fewer hangs
   in the user interface are experienced when re-rendering a layer (as
   happens whenever the user changes the look of points or shapes in a
   layer). Since remote databases can also be layers, this multi-threaded
   approach is more resilient against connectivity problems, too. The
   interface also now supports temporary "scratch" layers that can be used to
   merge, filter, or simply experiment with a data set, but are not saved
   when the current project is saved.

   For working on the canvas itself, polygonal regions can now use raster
   images (tiled, if necessary) as fill colors, the map itself can be rotated
   arbitrarily, and objects can be "snapped" to align with items on any layer
   (not just the current layer). For working with raster image layers (e.g.,
   aerial photographs) or simply creating new geometric shapes by hand, there
   is a new digitizing tool that can offer assistance by locking lines to
   specific angles, automatically keeping borders parallel, and other
   niceties.

   There is a completely overhauled "simplify" tool that is used to reduce
   the number of extraneous vertices of a vector layer (thus reducing its
   size). The old simplify tool provided only a relative "tolerance" setting
   that did not correspond directly to any units. With the new tool, users
   can set a simplification threshold in terms of the underlying map units,
   layer-specific units, pixels, and more—and, in addition, the tool reports
   how much the simplify operation has reduced the size of the data.

   [QGIS style editing]

   There has also been an effort to present a uniform interface to one of the
   most important features of the map canvas: the ability to change the
   symbology used for an item based on some data attribute. The simplest
   example might be to change the line color of a road based on whether its
   road-type attribute is "highway," "service road," "residential," or so on.
   But the same feature is used to automatically highlight layer information
   based on the filtering and querying functionality discussed above. The new
   release allows many more map attributes to be controlled by these "data
   definition" settings, and provides a hard-to-miss button next to each
   attribute, through which a custom data definition can be set.

   QGIS's composer module is the tool used to take project data and generate
   a map that can be used outside of the application (in print, as a static
   image, or as a layer for MapServer or some other software tool, for
   example). Consequently, it is not a simple select-and-click-export tool;
   composing the output can involve a lot of choices about which data to make
   visible, how (and where) to label it, and how to make it generally
   accessible.

   The updated composer in 2.8 now has a full-screen mode and sports several
   new options for configuring output. For instance, the user now has full
   control over how map axes are labeled. In previous releases, the grid
   coordinates of the map could be turned on or off, but the only options
   were all or nothing. Now, the user can individually choose whether
   coordinates are displayed on all four sides, and can even choose in which
   direction vertical text labels will run (so that they can be correctly
   justified to the edge of the map, for example).

   There are, as usual, many more changes than there is room to discuss. Some
   particularly noteworthy improvements include the ability to save and load
   bookmarks for frequently used data sources (perhaps most useful for
   databases, web services, and other non-local data) and improvements to
   QGIS's server module. This module allows one QGIS instance to serve up
   data accessible to other QGIS applications (for example, to simply team
   projects). The server can now be extended with Python plugins and the data
   layers that it serves can be styled with style rules like those used in
   the desktop interface.

   QGIS is one of those rare free-software applications that is both powerful
   enough for high-end work and yet also straightforward to use for the
   simple tasks that might attract a newcomer to GIS in the first place. The
   2.8 release, particularly with its project-wide commitment to long-term
   support, appears to be an update well worth checking out, whether one
   needs to create a simple, custom map or to mine a database for obscure
   geo-referenced meaning.

   Comments (3 posted)

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

   By Jonathan Corbet
   March 25, 2015

   The LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September
   2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which
   LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as
   an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two
   projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one
   project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not
   mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two
   projects' development communities reveals some interesting differences.

    Release histories

   Apache OpenOffice has made two releases in the past year: 4.1 in April
   2014 and 4.1.1 (described as "a micro update" in the release announcement)
   in August. The main feature added during that time would appear to be
   significantly improved accessibility support.

   The release history for LibreOffice tells a slightly different story:

     Release     Date           
     4.2.3       April 2014     
     4.1.6       April 2014     
     4.2.4       May 2014       
     4.2.5       June 2014      
     4.3         July 2014      
     4.2.6       August 2014    
     4.3.1       August 2014    
     4.3.2       September 2014 
     4.2.7/4.3.3 October 2014   
     4.3.4       November 2014  
     4.2.8       December 2014  
     4.3.5       December 2014  
     4.4         January 2015   
     4.3.6       February 2015  
     4.4.1       February 2015  

   It seems clear that LibreOffice has maintained a rather more frenetic
   release cadence, generally putting out at least one release per month. The
   project typically keeps at least two major versions alive at any one time.
   Most of the releases are of the minor, bug-fix variety, but there have
   been two major releases in the last year as well.

    Development statistics

   In the one-year period since late March 2014, there have been 381
   changesets committed to the OpenOffice Subversion repository. The most
   active committers are:

     Most active OpenOffice developers
     By changesets                   By changed lines                    
     Herbert Dürr           63 16.6% Jürgen Schmidt         455499 88.1% 
     Jürgen Schmidt         56 14.7% Andre Fischer          26148  3.8%  
     Armin Le Grand         56 14.7% Pedro Giffuni          23183  3.4%  
     Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 46 12.1% Armin Le Grand         11018  1.6%  
     Tsutomu Uchino         33 8.7%  Juan C. Sanz           4582   0.7%  
     Kay Schenk             27 7.1%  Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 4309   0.6%  
     Pedro Giffuni          23 6.1%  Andrea Pescetti        3908   0.6%  
     Ariel Constenla-Haile  22 5.8%  Herbert Dürr           2811   0.4%  
     Andrea Pescetti        14 3.7%  Tsutomu Uchino         1991   0.3%  
     Steve Yin              11 2.9%  Ariel Constenla-Haile  1258   0.2%  
     Andre Fischer          10 2.6%  Steve Yin              1010   0.1%  
     Yuri Dario             7  1.8%  Kay Schenk             616    0.1%  
     Regina Henschel        6  1.6%  Regina Henschel        417    0.1%  
     Juan C. Sanz           2  0.5%  Yuri Dario             268    0.0%  
     Clarence Guo           2  0.5%  tal                    16     0.0%  
     Tal Daniel             2  0.5%  Clarence Guo           11     0.0%  

   In truth, the above list is not just the most active OpenOffice developers
   — it is all of them; a total of 16 developers have committed changes to
   OpenOffice in the last year. Those developers changed 528,000 lines of
   code, but, as can be seen above, Jürgen Schmidt accounted for the bulk of
   those changes, which were mostly updates to translation files.

   The top four developers in the "by changesets" column all work for IBM, so
   IBM is responsible for a minimum of about 60% of the changes to OpenOffice
   in the last year.

   The picture for LibreOffice is just a little bit different; in the same
   one-year period, the project has committed 22,134 changesets from 268
   developers. The most active of these developers were:

     Most active LibreOffice developers
     By changesets                     By changed lines                       
     Caolán McNamara        4307 19.5% Lionel Elie Mamane        244062 12.5% 
     Stephan Bergmann       2351 10.6% Noel Grandin              238711 12.2% 
     Miklos Vajna           1449 6.5%  Stephan Bergmann          161220 8.3%  
     Tor Lillqvist          1159 5.2%  Miklos Vajna              129325 6.6%  
     Noel Grandin           1064 4.8%  Caolán McNamara           97544  5.0%  
     Markus Mohrhard        935  4.2%  Tomaž Vajngerl            69404  3.6%  
     Michael Stahl          915  4.1%  Tor Lillqvist             59498  3.1%  
     Kohei Yoshida          755  3.4%  Laurent Balland-Poirier   52802  2.7%  
     Tomaž Vajngerl         658  3.0%  Markus Mohrhard           50509  2.6%  
     Thomas Arnhold         619  2.8%  Kohei Yoshida             45514  2.3%  
     Jan Holesovsky         466  2.1%  Chris Sherlock            36788  1.9%  
     Eike Rathke            457  2.1%  Peter Foley               34305  1.8%  
     Matteo Casalin         442  2.0%  Christian Lohmaier        33787  1.7%  
     Bjoern Michaelsen      421  1.9%  Thomas Arnhold            32722  1.7%  
     Chris Sherlock         396  1.8%  David Tardon              21681  1.1%  
     David Tardon           386  1.7%  David Ostrovsky           21620  1.1%  
     Julien Nabet           362  1.6%  Jan Holesovsky            20792  1.1%  
     Zolnai Tamás           338  1.5%  Valentin Kettner          20526  1.1%  
     Matúš Kukan            256  1.2%  Robert Antoni Buj Gelonch 20447  1.0%  
     Robert Antoni Buj      231  1.0%  Michael Stahl             18216  0.9%  
     Gelonch                           

   To a first approximation, the top ten companies supporting LibreOffice in
   the last year are:

     Companies supporting LibreOffice development
     (by changesets)           
     Red Hat                   8417     38.0%     
     Collabora Multimedia      6531     29.5%     
     (Unknown)                 5126     23.2%     
     (None)                    1490     6.7%      
     Canonical                 422      1.9%      
     Igalia S.L.               80       0.4%      
     Ericsson                  21       0.1%      
     Yandex                    18       0.1%      
     FastMail.FM               17       0.1%      
     SUSE                      7        0.0%      

   Development work on LibreOffice is thus concentrated in a small number of
   companies, though it is rather more spread out than OpenOffice
   development. It is worth noting that the LibreOffice developers with
   unknown affiliation, who contributed 23% of the changes, make up 82% of
   the developer base, so there would appear to be a substantial community of
   developers contributing from outside the above-listed companies.

    Some conclusions

   Last October, some concerns were raised on the OpenOffice list about the
   health of that project's community. At the time, Rob Weir shrugged them
   off as the result of a marketing effort by the LibreOffice crowd. There
   can be no doubt that the war of words between these two projects has
   gotten tiresome at times, but, looking at the above numbers, it is hard
   not to conclude that there is an issue that goes beyond marketing hype
   here.

   In the 4½ years since its founding, the LibreOffice project has put
   together a community with over 250 active developers. There is support
   from multiple companies and an impressive rate of patches going into the
   project's repository. The project's ability to sustain nearly monthly
   releases on two branches is a direct result of that community's work.
   Swearing at LibreOffice is one of your editor's favorite pastimes, but it
   seems clear that the project is on a solid footing with a healthy
   community.

   OpenOffice, instead, is driven by four developers from a single company —
   a company that appears to have been deemphasizing OpenOffice work for some
   time. As a result, the project's commit rate is a fraction of what
   LibreOffice is able to sustain and releases are relatively rare. As of
   this writing, the OpenOffice blog shows no posts in 2015. In the October
   discussion, Rob said that "the dogs may bark but the caravan moves on."
   That may be true, but, in this case, the caravan does not appear to be
   moving with any great speed.

   Anything can happen in the free-software development world; it is entirely
   possible that a reinvigorated OpenOffice.org may yet give LibreOffice a
   run for its money. But something will clearly have to change to bring that
   future around. As things stand now, it is hard not to conclude that
   LibreOffice has won the battle for developer participation.

   Comments (74 posted)

   Page editor: Jonathan Corbet

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

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