This is a big deal. Arduino has accepted 32 million in VC money and the new “Pro” boards are not open source,so they won’t be as easily cloned, and code and libraries in the ide could be unavailable to see or modify!
And I won’t be using any of these boards.
Arduino was what brought me into microcontroller programming. I used it during my studies and in a lot of private projects.
When seeing their “Pro” boards for the first time my first thought was “This is not the Arduino how it used to be”.
So far I bought original boards from time to time to donate a bit of money that way, but with their recent decisions I’ll probably focus on cheap clones, now. Arduino is no longer alone in this segment. The Raspberry Pi Pico is a nice and cheap open source platform which is a pretty interesting alternative.
Raspberry pi also uses C++ right?
Exactly. The Pico can be programmed in C++. But if you like, you can also program it using MicroPython.