People mention about Pi Z clones

[alexeames]

TBH, the Orange/Roseapple/Banana lot ARE annoying; it's really not cool to have someone ride on your coattails like that.

I still do not understand the logic by which the name "Orange Pi" is a terrible appropriation, but "Gertduino" is not.

Ooh - that one burns
I think the difference is that Arduino is open source and encourages clones.

[Heater]

Open source or not the Arduino name is trademarked.

As it happens there has been much squabbling over that trade mark recently: https://lwn.net/Articles/637755/

With the end result that the original creators of the Arduino now call their product "Genuino"

Anyway, there are a lot xxxuino products around that may or may not be good clones or even compatible with Arduino. They are all clearly capitalizing on the brand recognition.

The RandomFruit Pi products we see now are doing the same. Probably with less regard to compatibility.

[liz]

Yeah - one of the things that went wrong there (and was behind the recent drama) was that the name "Arduino" WASN'T trademarked for a very long time, so there are a bajilion something-duino products out there from before they actually trademarked it.

[Pithagoros]

The Arduino story is worse.

The founders were originally licensers of the design as Arduino LLC held the IP, manufacturing done by licence to partner companies. One of the partner companies (Smart Projects) secretly trademarked the Arduino name in Italy. When it all came out and the arguments started, Smart Projects changed their name to Arduino SRL refused to pay royalties and effectively nicked the Arduino name - whilst mimicking the Arduino logo design and website. I think LLC had the trademark in the US first and so it is still Arduino there, but Genuino elsewhere.

[Heater]

The silliest xxxduino case is the Esprunio. It's nothing like an Arduino. It's a tiny STM32 F4 board running Javascript with a very neat browser based IDE.

Mind you, the Espruino is a brilliant device and Gordon Williams has done a fantastic job of making a JS run time for it. Support is excellent too.

[ejolson]

The silliest xxxduino case is the Esprunio. It's nothing like an Arduino. It's a tiny STM32 F4 board running Javascript with a very neat browser based IDE.

Mind you, the Espruino is a brilliant device and Gordon Williams has done a fantastic job of making a JS run time for it. Support is excellent too.

Trademarks are designed to avoid market confusion in which two products are confounded because of identical or similar names. So between "Orange Pi" and "Raspberry Tau" which would be more easily mistaken for a product manufactured by the Raspberry Pi Foundation? To me the fruit-Pi names seem more different than the Raspberry-greek-letter names. I expect this is why the fruit-Pi names are being used. At any rate, given how much product information is available over the internet, I have never been confused about which products were made by which companies.

Does anyone know details of the software license for the version of Mathematica that is available in Raspbian? Does this license legally prevent the program from running on hardware not built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation? In particular, assuming sufficient hardware compatibility is it even legal to run Raspbian with Mathematica using an ARM emulator under QEMU or on other single board ARM computers?

[fruitoftheloom]

The silliest xxxduino case is the Esprunio. It's nothing like an Arduino. It's a tiny STM32 F4 board running Javascript with a very neat browser based IDE.

Mind you, the Espruino is a brilliant device and Gordon Williams has done a fantastic job of making a JS run time for it. Support is excellent too.

Trademarks are designed to avoid market confusion in which two products are confounded because of identical or similar names. So between "Orange Pi" and "Raspberry Tau" which would be more easily mistaken for a product manufactured by the Raspberry Pi Foundation? To me the fruit-Pi names seem more different than the Raspberry-greek-letter names. I expect this is why the fruit-Pi names are being used. At any rate, given how much product information is available over the internet, I have never been confused about which products were made by which companies.

Does anyone know details of the software license for the version of Mathematica that is available in Raspbian? Does this license legally prevent the program from running on hardware not built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation? In particular, assuming sufficient hardware compatibility is it even legal to run Raspbian with Mathematica using an ARM emulator under QEMU or on other single board ARM computers?

The latest I could locate:

https://www.wolfram.com/legal/agreement ... ry-pi.html

[hippy]

The Arduino story is worse.

The founders were originally licensers of the design as Arduino LLC held the IP, manufacturing done by licence to partner companies. One of the partner companies (Smart Projects) secretly trademarked the Arduino name in Italy. When it all came out and the arguments started, Smart Projects changed their name to Arduino SRL refused to pay royalties and effectively nicked the Arduino name - whilst mimicking the Arduino logo design and website. I think LLC had the trademark in the US first and so it is still Arduino there, but Genuino elsewhere.

It is easy to suggest SRL inappropriately took or stole LLC's trademark for their own use, but it's not that simple. It is likely to only be settled by the upcoming court case but how settled, how internationally binding any ruling is, remains to be seen.

Both appear to have some legitimate basis for their respective claims and the courts will have to sort that out. It could be that the court rules each are right with each retaining the trademarks where registered. That might sort out the legal position but it won't resolve the acrimony and other issues.

[ejolson]

Does anyone know details of the software license for the version of Mathematica that is available in Raspbian? Does this license legally prevent the program from running on hardware not built by the Raspberry Pi Foundation? In particular, assuming sufficient hardware compatibility is it even legal to run Raspbian with Mathematica using an ARM emulator under QEMU or on other single board ARM computers?

The latest I could locate:

https://www.wolfram.com/legal/agreement ... ry-pi.html

That license indicates

Permitted Uses and Installations

Subject to the terms of this Agreement and Your acceptance thereof, WRI grants You a non-exclusive license to use the Product solely for personal or educational purposes on a Model A or Model B Raspberry Pi computer.

which appears to make it impossible to legally use Raspbian with Mathematica preinstalled on the Zero, A+, B+ and 2B versions of the Raspberry Pi. At the same time, back in Feb 2015 Ben Nuttall said that Mathematica would "still be free" for the Pi 2B. I wonder what the situation is for the Zero and whether the license agreement on the Wolfram website could be updated to reflect the new Pi models.

[W. H. Heydt]

TBH, the Orange/Roseapple/Banana lot ARE annoying; it's really not cool to have someone ride on your coattails like that.

I still do not understand the logic by which the name "Orange Pi" is a terrible appropriation, but "Gertduino" is not.

Ooh - that one burns
I think the difference is that Arduino is open source and encourages clones.

Possibly a bigger difference is that the MCU for *duino boards/clones is readily available in small quantities, thereby making actual colones easy. None of the "<fruit> Pi" boards are using Broadcom SoCs or VC4 GPUs, and --thus--are never actual "clones" of the Raspberry Pi. The are just "sort of works alike" boards.

[TheGuyUk]

I was reading the Raspberry Pi FAQ and the limits of the soc used which reminded me that the Roku 3 uses a Broadcom Soc too, except that the Roku 3 Soc is a dual core 900mhz.

Wonder if any Pi device might ever use the same Soc as the Roku 3 ?

Here is a Roku 3 teardown for the tech minded,
http://www.mycablealternatives.com/2015 ... -teardown/

[fruitoftheloom]

I was reading the Raspberry Pi FAQ and the limits of the soc used which reminded me that the Roku 3 uses a Broadcom Soc too, except that the Roku 3 Soc is a dual core 900mhz.

Wonder if any Pi device might ever use the same Soc as the Roku 3 ?

Actually some models of Roku used the RPi Single Core SoC BCM2835

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roku

There is no need to change the VC4 VPU, just need to change the ARM CPU to create a newer SoC.

VC4 with the new driver stack will keep the Raspberries relevant for a few more years.....