>I know people who have worked with Terrone. His reputation is not so great either, he is an arrogant dude.
>So take this post with a grain of salt, it is part of a smear campaign that Terrone is going about online.
I could not disagree with this more strongly. I have exchanged emails with both Limor and Philip on many occasions, both are the most authentic advocates and supporters of Maker culture I have ever encountered. They are true believers and I have seen them consistently put those values ahead of business considerations.
Federico Musto lied about his academic credentials and Limor made it very clear why she took that personally:
To women in the maker movement, who are often accused of being fake geeks and frequently have their expertise questioned, Musto’s apparent lies are personal affronts. “When you go to MIT, there is always this murmur that they had to lower the standards for you,” Fried says. “And after you graduate, you get asked all the time if you were actually smart enough to have earned your credentials. It’s a little bit insane that this guy has gotten this far without ever being questioned.”
So yeah, they have every reason to shut Federico Musto down and he in no way appears even remotely qualified to be in the position he is now. That's not a "smear" campaign- that's accountability and a community enforceing it's core values.
Perhaps i'm missing something, but who cares if Musto even blatantly lied about his credentials? It's not relevant to the project, except in terms of his credibility, and hopefully there are better guards against fraud than checking resumes.
Caring about academic credentials in a non-academic (or otherwise certified) field seems exhausting, pointless, and only bolsters the military-industrial-academic complex.
Doghunter labs received funding from the University of Messina in part because Musto claimed IBM, Olivetti, an MIT doctorate and an NYU masters on his resume. This is fraud under Italian law, and now Musto -- and by extension Doghunter labs and now Arduino -- may face criminal and civil penalties.
Musto is, simply, a liability to Arduino. Yet under last September's agreement, he controls 51% of the organization.
Contextualizing that, Arduino is by far the most successful Open Hardware effort ever. Allowing Musto to continue his influence over Arduino casts a shadow over the entire Open Hardware movement.
Calling Arduino "open hardware" is a bit of a stretch. That's like calling Windows an "open source" because you can create and run your own programs on it.
In addition to the aforementioned fraud, I think it's also about the fact that this was a lie, not necessarily that it's about the lack of credentials.
>The .org people (Federico Musto) are different than the Arduino.cc people
This is false. The 'Arduinos' were effectively combined last September. [1] It's now "Arduino Holding", and the "Arduino Foundation", of which Musto owns or controls 51%.
As for the outing of Musto's academic record, I would simply suggest Torrone is looking out for Arduino, and importantly the idea and reputation of Arduino as the most successful Open Hardware project. Musto has proven himself a liability to the Arduino brand, and he controls a majority of it. As child comments have said, it's not character assassination if it's true.
Personally, I think missing Eagle files for a few Arduino boards doesn't quite qualify for not being open source. That's a due diligence issue that many more open source projects are guilty of, especially in the open source hardware world. The power of Arduino is in the IDE and to a lesser extent, the bootloader, which are obviously Open Source. However, numerous publications [2] have written about the Musto situation, pointing out the grave situation they're in, and nothing has been done about it yet.
Disclosure: I wrote the hackaday post [1]. Torrone has shared documents with me, and I spent a few bucks on Fiverr to translate Italian court docs. The situation is fucked.
I'll definitely be checking that out, but the Arduino software platform has been the real winner and there's no question about its openness - their bootloader, IDE and libraries have all done very well in the community. They've even got tools to make pulling in external libraries super simple, I'll have to check out PlatformIO and compare.
PlatformIO is even simpler, you just add your libraries and versions to your config file and it pulls them in automatically, plus it autoupdates your platforms so you don't have to. I love it.
While we're taking things with a grain of salt. I'd like to point out that this poster (ArduinoGuy) only has posts defending arduino.org. I'm not saying they're wrong because of that, but I am saying that that is at least suspicious.
> In the article where Federico Musto is reported to have faked his background, it says at the bottom that Philip Terrone is the source of the tip about Musto's educational background
That's not evidence of a "back room" smear campaign. It's the opposite of that, an on-the-record and truthful accusation.
Mm, your comments is unrelated to the issue being talked about in the email. I don't particularly care about who sent the email as much as the source code being available.
How is this a "smear campaign"? He privately contacted someone who lied to tell them to stop lying, and in response, they lied again about whether they'd correct it. Only then did he go to the media.
Is lying good now, and pointing out liars bad? Can you explain this newfangled morality?
I find it hard to take a post that accuses someone of engaging in an unwarranted "vendetta" and smear campaign that includes the unsupported hearsay alleging the perpetrator has a bad reputation and is an "arrogant dude" very seriously. It's hard to take the high road when you're digging your own set of tunnels.
The accusation is "Arduino is no longer open source", but the "proof" is a mostly a few missing license files, with a few other incomplete source submissions. No change of licenses, no new bits without sources, nothing to really indicate an actual change instead of some minor oversights.
I'm not familiar with the conflict, but this really looks like smearing at worst, and bad clickbait at best.
> I know people who have worked with Terrone. His reputation is not so great either, he is an arrogant dude.
I used to watch the adafruit streams and youtube videos. You can definitely get a sense for this in those videos. I quit watching their stuff b/c he just rubbed me the wrong way with how he interacts with the community.
