I don't doubt that they'll try, but I don't think they have the market position to pull that off anymore, not with ESP32 et al. ascendant. Or maybe I'm just out of touch with that side of the market, hard to tell.
A lot of people still program ESP32's with the arduino IDE.
And there are a good number of devices on the shelves of stores today which contain the arduino bootloader. It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.
My dumb fridge for example runs on top of the arduino bootloader on an atmel chip - it has the distinctive 1 second startup delay and speaks stk500. And all that chip supports is four temperature sensors, two fans, two door switches and lights, a little 7 seg display and up/down buttons for temperature, a defrost heater, door edge heater, and a relay for the compressor motor.
> It turns out the "point and click and get a working IoT product" tends to outcompete hiring a professional embedded coder to spend months to make something bespoke from scratch.
Setting up an embedded toolchain and development/debug workflow from scratch is so tedious. No wonder Arduino (and Micropython) has had so much success. I write Micropython for flight controllers in the High Power Rocketry hobby. I get a lot of snide remarks from the other people doing embedded coding but my stuff runs just fine and i can get to a blinking LED (the helloworld of embedded) on a new board in ..seconds typically.
Those remarks tend to stop when you can add some new feature in 5 minutes which would take a 'proper' embedded dev days.
Eg.:
Gee, it would be nice to measure CO2 high in the atmosphere from our hobby rocket, let me just plonk this CO2 monitor in, hook it up to 2 pins, and add 3 lines of code to read from the sensor and write to an SD card file every second.
Thats the kind of thing that, for most other toolchains/IDE's, would require reconfiguring HAL's to get I2C working, configuring the pins to have the right drive strength and pullups, studying datasheets to find out what registers to read/write to get the sensor going, etc...
Arduino is supporting the official MicroPython project and has released ports for a number of boards in addition to tools like a simple MicroPython IDE and a GUI installer.
True, which is to say they are a competitor with alternate toolchains
If I get a board with an Arm0 chip and want to flash it with micropython, Arduino is not the only game in town (not even my first choice by a long shot, ymmv)
With the lower power AVR chips, Arduino's only competitor was the project it was forked from, Wiring - any other embedded toolchains were not even trying to reach the casual hobbyist, the Arduino IDE dominates that niche.
Pretty sure the "Arduino ecosystem" is more than just the boards. It's also a bunch of libraries that provide a standard interface to a bunch of different hardware as well as tooling to build, flash, and monitor those libraries. While I don't love those libraries or tools, they do a half-decent job of papering over the shockingly painful esp-idf (the equivalent libraries for ESP32 boards) which I understand to be one of the better embedded SDKs.
The problem is that they aren't the only business in town anymore.
A lot of the hobbyist stuff is moving to MicroPython / CircuitPython, PlatformIO is eating the more hardcore market, and professionals will just stick to whatever RTOS & HAL they were already using.
I forsee they'll make all those libraries and tools free for hobbyists - and maybe even 'less than free' - ie. "We'll send you a free dev board if you download the IDE!".
But if anyone tries to ship arduino code in a commercial product, they'll want royalties.
Or if any microcontroller maker wants to be supported by the ecosystem, they'll also want royalties.
And the royalty levels will be low because there are competing ecosystems of tools - but across such a huge market of embedded commercial electronics, I think they'll still do very well.
If you respect the open source license , you're free to use the Arduino code in products. We offer a licensing scheme for companies that want to license the hardware designs to use in proprietary products.
The IDE is there, it's free, it's more powerful than ever and it supports any architecture the community wants to work on. Free, no royalties no licenses etc
The idea of getting 10% of ESP32 revenues sounds pretty funny to me. Based on how absurdly cheap I can buy the assembled boards and have them shipped across the globe, I imagine the margins are razor thin on those anyways. And if they raised prices, I'd move to other products.
