Crossposting my comment from the blog post here, because the Arduino servers are apparently under heavy load, and most people will TLDR the post and just look at the comments here.

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Hi All,

I recently launched a Kickstarter project as well, that ended about a month and a half ago: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/18182218/freesoc-and-fre...

Dimitri, the creator of the smARtDUINO project got in touch with me a few weeks ago to collaborate on creating a smARtBUS adaptor for our platform.

We’ve exchanged over 40 emails since then, and my impression is that he’s an earnest, upstanding man, who really cares a lot about the electronics community and making it easier and less expensive for people to do creative things.

We had a discussion about Kickstarter in particular, and one of the things he mentioned to me in our conversation was that he felt his campaign placed too much emphasis on the “Arduinoness” of the project, and not enough emphasis on the true innovation, which is the smARtBUS interconnect system.

We discussed the perils of successfully marketing a Kickstarter project, and said in retrospect, “If we communicate better the project, I have no idea were we can be now that it should be clear this is not just another Arduino.” (this was about a week ago, near the end of his campaign.)

I think if you can honestly blame him for anything, it’s not effectively conveying the message of the product in an concise way. If his workers were indeed manufacturing Arduino in Italy, there’s nothing wrong with claiming it. I’ll admit that the claim might look deceptively grand at first glance, but my intuition tells me this has more to do with Dimitri’s English ability, rather than a malevolent attempt at hijacking the Arduino brand.