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.
Exactly. The Pico can be programmed in C++. But if you like, you can also program it using MicroPython.