I’ve been writing about Arduino for almost 20 years. The annual open source report has become one of those rituals where you can take the temperature of a project that matters to (what was) millions of people. Last year I wrote up the 2024 report and flagged a Russian entity that had become the top library contributor while apparently stripping attribution (Limor’s code) from the translated code. This year Qualcomm and Arduino hid this, or who knows. Don’t worry, this year the story is different but the trajectory is worse.
First up – the 2025 Arduino Open Source Report (Arduino blog post) cover page contains the text “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” in 11.5pt RobotoMono-Regular, colored #9e9e9e (medium gray), positioned in the lower-right quadrant of page 1. You can’t see it when viewing the PDF because the gray text sits on top of the cover photograph and blends in. But select-all on the page and there it is. (Someone probably set up the presentation template with a gray “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL” watermark for internal review, the cover photo went behind it, the text became invisible, and nobody thought to remove it before publishing.)
Of course, the big news is Arduino is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. The acquisition closed in late 2025, and since then we’ve watched the new ownership rewrite the Terms of Service to include perpetual irrevocable content licenses, ban reverse engineering (on a platform built on hackability), integrate user data into Qualcomm’s corporate data infrastructure, and require contributors to agree to a 6,000-word Qualcomm privacy policy just to submit a bug fix. Limor and I asked Arduino and Qualcomm about all of this, but they didn’t respond to our inquiries.
The numbers, year over year
Here’s the comparison, metrics from both the 2024 and 2025 reports.
Things that went down
- Zephyr upstream patches: 114 in 2024, to 74 in 2025
- Arduino IDE releases: 5 to 3
- Arduino CLI releases: 18 to 10
- MicroPython Lab releases: 3 to 2
- New official libraries: 19 to 11
- Cloud CLI releases: 11 to 5
- Cloud Agent releases: 17 to just 1
- New community library versions: 6,775 to 6,602
- Upstream project contributions listed: 5 projects in 2024 (Zephyr, MicroPython, ESP32 core, Silicon Labs core, microROS), 3 in 2025 (Zephyr, MicroPython, Linux)
Things that went up
- Official library releases: 69 in 2024, 93 in 2025
- Official core releases: 10 to 13
- Project Hub tutorials: 368 to 420
- Community platform releases: 69 in 2024, 215 in 2025 (though the 2025 report changed its tracking methodology, so this comparison may not be apples-to-apples)
- New community libraries: 1,198 to 1,218 (basically flat)
Things that disappeared
- The “How to support the Arduino project” page is gone. In 2024, the report explicitly told people to buy original boards, subscribe to Cloud, donate, or contribute code. That entire page was removed from the 2025 report. Buying original Arduino boards used to fund open source development “for the benefit of the entire ecosystem, including other hardware manufacturers.” That framing is gone now.
- Trema.ru, the Russian entity I flagged last year as the top contributor with questionable attribution practices, vanished from the 2025 leaderboard entirely. No explanation given about what happened. Was their code audited? Were libraries removed? Did they just stop contributing? The world may never know.
- The upstream contribution list dropped ESP32 core, Silicon Labs core, and microROS. Three of the five upstream projects Arduino was contributing to in 2024 are no longer mentioned.
Where the resources went
The UNO Q is all over this report. It’s THE Qualcomm Arduino, featuring a Dragonwing SoC running Debian alongside an STM32 microcontroller. Arduino shipped a new Debian-based Linux distro for it, a new “App Lab” IDE for it, and a new “App CLI” command-line tool for it (10 releases already). There’s also a stable Zephyr core built specifically for the UNO Q.
Not surprising: Arduino redirected engineering capacity toward the Qualcomm product launch, and everything else got less attention. The IDE, the CLI, MicroPython support, the Cloud tools, upstream contributions… all declined. The one official core that got notable investment was the Zephyr core for the UNO Q. This is what acquisition often looks like from the outside…resources are shuffled around to appease the desires of a corporate parent.
Adafruit’s contributions went up
One thing worth noting from the contributor tables.
Adafruit’s library contributions in 2024: 6 new libraries, 122 releases.
Adafruit’s library contributions in 2025: 21 new libraries, 191 releases.
We went from 6 to 21 new libraries and from 122 to 191 releases – note Arduino’s own official library output dropped from 19 new libraries to 11. Open source hero Rob Tillaart continues to be a machine (50 new libraries, 399 releases in 2025) – go check out his github to learn about the latest cool chips! SparkFun (we’re compared to them a lot) went from 67 releases to 81.
So good news! The community is still building around the Arduino ecosystem.
What’s not in the report
Here’s what did not get covered, acknowledged or mentioned: The Terms of Service controversy. The reverse-engineering ban that Ars Technica, The Register, and half the maker internet covered. The CLA privacy policy that routes contributor data into Qualcomm’s corporate infrastructure. OSHWA certification (Arduino still has zero). Even the acquisition itself gets acknowledged only through the UNO Q product launch… no reflection on what it means for the project.
This one is not a big deal, just weird: the 2024 report said Arduino had existed for “18 years.” The 2025 report says “20 years.” Both can’t be right, so it would be good to know how they are counting that for historical reasons… Arduino had previously stated it was founded in 2005, making 2025 the 20th year.
The report also doesn’t address whether any of the new products will confirm they are actually open source and/or carry OSHWA certification. Michael Weinberg (of OSHWA and the Engelberg Center at NYU) wrote about this in October. The UNO Q has manufacturing files available under CC BY-SA 4.0, but Arduino did not release editable design files (the native CAD files you’d need to actually modify the board). The OSHWA Open Hardware Definition requires those, every founding Arduino member signed this, but that is not Qualcomm Arduino now. Qualcomm Arduino is calling it “open source” using a definition that doesn’t match the community standard or their own (previous) standards of “open.” And still zero OSHWA certifications. The VENTUNO Q product page says nothing about open source hardware either.
Looking ahead
Arduino Day(s) is this weekend March 27-28. At Embedded World earlier this month, they announced the VENTUNO Q… a $300 board with a Qualcomm Dragonwing IQ8 processor, 40 TOPS NPU, 16GB RAM, 64GB storage, and an STM32H5 microcontroller. It’s purpose-built for robotics, edge AI, and “generative AI workloads.” The name means twenty-one in Italian, for the 21st anniversary (I guess that answers the age question? Or maybe just makes it a bit more confusing)
Fabio Violante’s title now reads “VP & GM, Arduino, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.” He used to be CEO of Arduino. If so, is there a CEO anymore or are they no longer a “independent subsidiary”.
The band continues to play… Even with Arduino trying to go another direction, the Zephyr transition is good engineering work and the community library numbers around that are not bad. 8,754 total libraries in the index. But right now there’s two directions – one for the community of developers with libraries, board designs, and open source development – and one for the Arduino/Qualcomm ‘business’ with Qualcomm silicon, AI workloads, and the UNO/VENTUNO Q product line. Comments around the developer spaces on the VENTUNO Q announcement say a lot of the same things:
“I don’t think Arduino branded products are targeted at us anymore” and “I have lost all faith and trust in arduino.”
The overall corporate direction is what is the most troubling. Output dropped across almost every metric Arduino controls. The legal framework shifted dramatically in Qualcomm’s favor. And the company that positioned itself as “loving open source” hardware chose not to address any of it in its own annual report about open source…
When this post goes live, I will send it to Qualcomm for comment on this report. Maybe someone else will cover this, but each time they dodge reporters while claiming they are not available while on one of Qualcomm’s many many private jets that they keep buying (Gulfstream G650ERs and G550s… along with new G800s).
I would like to interview Fabio’s boss, Nakul Duggal, Executive Vice President and Group General Manager, Automotive, Industrial and Embedded IoT, and Robotics, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. Looks like he got promoted. Duggal runs the whole automotive/industrial/IoT/robotics group at Qualcomm. Fabio Violante (formerly CEO of Arduino) reports to Duggal as “VP & GM, Arduino.” Arduino is now a line item in a division that also includes automotive SoCs for Volkswagen, Li Auto, and Leapmotor. We wonder how much executive attention Arduino is going to get.
Duggal’s the one who said at the acquisition press release that sounded AI generated… “My success criteria is that the Arduino ecosystem doesn’t even feel that there is any change in ownership here.” Six months later Qualcomm rewrote the TOS, effectively banned reverse engineering, and routed developer data into Qualcomm’s corporate ingestion machine. So… mission not accomplished on that particular success criterion, dude.
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![hierarchical FPGA utilization map for the BIO implementation on a Digilent Arty (XC7A100T), total design: 41,757 cells. the BIO block (bio_apb, highlighted in magenta outline) consumes 14,597 cells... roughly 35% of the design. inside, four PicoRV32 cores (mach[0] through mach[3]) range from 1,698 to 1,937 leaf cells each... compact enough that all four together barely exceed a single PIO state machine's ~5,000 cell footprint. the host CPU (VexRiscvAxi4) sits at 8,017 cells including caches, with the remaining area eaten by AXI crossbars, bus adapters, and bridge logic. compare this to the PIO utilization map shown earlier in the post, where the PIO alone consumed 39,087 cells and dominated the floorplan... the BIO achieves a richer RV32E instruction set in less than 40% of the PIO's area. the visual tells the RISC-vs-CISC story immediately: four full CPU cores plus bus infrastructure, and you're still smaller than nine custom instructions with barrel shifters.](https://cdn-blog.adafruit.com/uploads/2026/03/bio-only-utilization.jpeg)
