Arduino.cc and Arduino.org have settled their differences
blog.arduino.cc
blog.arduino.cc
Even though it was the biggest and most influential hobbyist electronics environment, there have been other mcu based environments popping up. Some were offshoots, such as TI's Energia, which added some innovative elements like an RTOS. Hopefully, the arduino environment moves forward even faster from now on.
http://hackaday.com/2015/03/12/arduino-v-arduino-part-ii/
For a long while, most people didn't understand the turmoil in the arduino market. The competing arduino.srl tried to fork the ide and even the history of the project.
Here's a direct statement from Banzi Massimo: http://makezine.com/2015/03/19/massimo-banzi-fighting-for-ar...
But when Arduino LLC tried to register the Arduino trademark, it turned out Gianluca Martino had registered the trademark for his own company two years prior, and not told the others. (Arduino LLC got the trademark in the USA, but were not able to register it anywhere else) This happened in 2008. At the time, they just agreed to stay friends and not make a big deal of it.
Then, last year, Smart Projects SRL made a big deal of it. They renamed their company Arduino SRL, registered arduino.org and cut their ties to Arduino LLC. This was reportedly because LLC wanted to start licensing the name to other manufacturers, but SRL wanted to keep official Arduino manufacturing to themselves. This led to the arduino.cc/arduino.org split.
That's pretty sleazy and anti-open source of them if you ask me.
https://arduinohistory.github.io
I think it's really appaling how the original inventor is (not) credited.
I don't see it that way, especially when you consider how the whole trademark issue went down. And then refusing to pay royalties and strong arming Arduino suppliers. This was not a simple personal disagreement, but overtly hostile and aggressive business moves which hurt the community.
To your point, Hernando Barragán has legitimate grievances, but that was not the main problem that was resolved.
When Arduino split Arduino SRL, with the factory in Italy, were the ones with the Arduino trademark in most markets outside the US. Arudino LLC therefor could, presumably, only sell and manufacture device in the US. It seems reasonable that the companies licensed to manufacture Arduino in the US, and can't manufacture anywhere else nor sell to the rest of the world, shouldn't have to compete with Genuinos that are manufactured in China.
In regards to Wiring the project was open source, a master thesis and lives on to this day. It's just that Arduino is more successful.
You can surely doubt the professionalism of many people involved in Arduino, but more than that what happened here is that Arduino forked Wiring and Pimoroni found it cumbersome to sell Arduinos. People always say they want open source or more community driven companies, but when things get complicated not only are people quick to turn on them (which is many times understandable) but they make the situation worse trying to pile on all the things they feel are bad to justify their feelings.
You can write code for the devices in the browser and auto-include the C++ classes from other projects.
(or you can do it all offline with GNU tools)
For 4 euro's and less you can buy a board with the ESP8266 and you can even use the Arduino IDE to program it.
And yes, I think the squabble left people a bit unsure about Arduino and then they discovered that there's ... the confusing mess that is mBed :-)
Of course the implicit assumption here is that people will get breakout boards like NodeMCU.
But for a lot uses they are a better fit. The ESP8266 is a right time and right place kind of thing - it has enough IO and wifi to be really useful for the hobby explosion of IoT stuff.
The skeptic in me says that by next year's Faire the alliance will have unraveled.
Both Massimo and Musto are passionate Italians with strong visions... and as the saying goes: too many cooks.
If you really are that lazy; arduino.cc and arduino.org settled their dispute and have setup a holding company to organize device sales using he Arduino brand. In a addition, a not-for-profit company is being setup to run the educational part of the organization.
I'm assuming this fixes all the B.S. that was the "Genuino" fiasco. Good riddance but the brand has been severely damaged by their scorched earth tactics with devices like the Raspberry Pi gaining amazing traction. It will be interesting to see if it can recover.
Ardiunos were fantastic in their time, but the industry has moved on.
Why work on an 8-bit MCU where you [mostly] have to bit bang IO when you can buy something like an STM32 which has hardware acceleration (DMA) for IO, and on higher models even adds things like an RTC?
Arduino has a great community, but there are far better choices available now, which are even Arduino compatible (e.g. Teensy) for the same price, but that use an ARM core instead of AVR.
Arduino now is a dead end. ARM ate the world, and it's now the better choice for new projects. Unless there's a need to support legacy designs implemented with Arduino, I see no compelling reason for people to continue to use them.
Also, for many uses programming in Linux is the exact opposite of direct when comparing to banging out some bare metal C or C++ on a dinky 8-bit micro. Maybe using a RasPi to blink LED or read a temperature sensor is more accessible to some people and that's a good thing, but it's like killing ants with a tactical nuke.
And the ecosystem of Arduino "shields" has become so popular that lots of people and companies make shields. Even the newer environments such as ARM's mBed will accept arduino shields due to their availability.
Collecting sensor data? Arduino is a lot leaner and to the point. Performing computations on sensor data? Might be better to use a Pi.