Arduino Wars: Group Splits

From Makezine:

There’s nothing worse than when a family starts fighting amongst itself. If only because, after years being cooped up for weeks at time during the Christmas vacations, you know exactly where to cause the maximum amount of damage.
Right now Arduino LLC—the company founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis, Tom Igoe and Gianluca Martino back in 2009—is suing Arduino Srl founded by Gianluca Martino.

The second Arduino, Arduino Srl that is, was originally named Smart Projects Srl and was responsible for manufacturing the Arduino boards in Italy. While the first Arduino, Arduino LLC, is the company we’re more familiar with, responsible for development of the boards, management of the open source projects surrounding it, and the community.
However disagreements last year about the direction of the Arduino brand between Martino and the other four other co-founders led to Martino taking on Federico Musto as the new CEO of Smart Projects and renaming the company Arduino Srl.
The Arduino board itself is open source—one of the earliest decisions made by the group behind the board was to release the design files. Anyone can make an Arduino compatible board, or even an exact copy of the board. However the Arduino name, logo and graphics are protected by trademark which, while it hasn’t stopped the flow of cheap counterfeit boards, has at least meant that if you saw a board with the Arduino logo on you could be fairly sure of its provenance.
Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. It’s difficult to determine what actually happened or is still happening, but right now we have the arduino.cc site we’re familiar with, the home of Arduino LLC, alongside arduino.org, a site created by the new Arduino Srl. Both use the same trade dress, logo, names, fonts—they even (mostly) call their products the same thing. At least at the moment, and at least to outsiders, there are two companies claiming to be “Arduino” and it’s rather hard to tell the difference.
Talking to la Repubblica back in November last year—when Musto was hired to lead Arduino Srl—Massimo Banzi said “E’ surreale quel che sta accadendo…” which, at least as close as my rusty Italian can make out, means that he thinks the entire situation is surreal, and really, who can blame him?
Right now the whole problem is sitting before the First Circuit and a Massachusetts District Court where Arduino LLC is suing Arduino Srl and co-defendants for trademark infringement.
Against this background is the quiet release by Arduino Srl, rather than Arduino LLC, of the long awaited Arduino Zero.

http://makezine.com/2015/03/06/arduino-vs-arduino/