This article is somewhat misleading. The changed ToS only covers Arduino's hosted cloud services, not the IDE or microcontroller library. This is spelled out in black and white in the first paragraph of the ToS:

> 1.1 The Site is part of the platform developed and managed by Arduino, which allows users to take part in the discussions on the Arduino forum, the Arduino blog, the Arduino User Group, the Arduino Discord channel, and the Arduino Project Hub, and to access the Arduino main website, subsites, Arduino Cloud, Arduino Courses, Arduino Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.Certifications, Arduino Docs, the Arduino EDU kit sites to release works within the Contributor License Agreement program, and to further develop the Arduino open source ecosystem (collectively, the “Platform”). The use of the Site, the Platform, and the Services is governed by these Terms including the other documents and policies made available on the Platform by Arduino.

(caveat - not a lawyer... but I'll share my opinion)

That list in 1.1 isn’t an exhaustive definition which is IMO, one of the causes of the fire. Again, "IMO", the list is an illustrative set of examples as there is no limiting language like "solely" or "only" and the clause even mixes services and purposes, which again signals it’s descriptive rather than definitive.

Saying that, whilst the list inside the definition of "the Platform" is illustrative, the category it defines seems scoped to Arduino-hosted online properties which could be argued is the intent. But its an argument alas...

Either way, ambiguous policy is being communicated by these T+C updates and that is a real problem.

The article is AI-written. Obviously can't be relied on to accurately convey the original information

"But Arduino isn’t SaaS. It’s the foundation of the maker ecosystem." is a giveaway, but the whole set of paragraphs of setup before that is chatgpt's style

Yeah no. Wishful thinking. History has shown that huge corporations taking over open source project generally results in a big change how those projects are governed and how the legalese like t&c turns out.

Not a lawyer obviously - but lets see how this plays out.