On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 10:46 AM, RussellMc wrote: > > BUT then something like the Arduino appears with no apparent > overwhelming technical merit, a dumbing down of ability and a > swallowing up of computer power, and then also many many many > (millions?) of people are actually doing all the things that people > say they could have been doing all these years. Whatever the 'could > have been' barrier was, Arduino has broken through it. None of the > could have beens managed. I agree that it wasn't technically ahead of any of the other development boards at the time. I think the thing that put it over the top was this, from the Arduino FAQ: "Open-source hardware shares much of the principles and approach of free and open-source software. In particular, we believe that people should be able to study our hardware to understand how it works, make changes to it, and share those changes. To facilitate this, we release all of the original design files (Eagle CAD) for the Arduino hardware. These files are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, which allows for both personal and commercial derivative works, as long as they credit Arduino and release their designs under the same license. The Arduino software is also open-source. The source code for the Java environment is released under the GPL and the C/C++ microcontroller libraries are under the LGPL." It also came at a time when sharing your code became very easy through free web hosting, sourceforge, github, etc. Eventually it hit a critical mass of people using it, and now it's going to be hard to beat. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .