Re: rPI Goes Public

Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Pancho <Pancho.Jones@proton.me> writes:

On 14/06/2024 09:44, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

Personally I think the people behind the Pi deserve to get rich,
they've made a product that's both practically and socially useful.

>
Yes, someone has done a good job, I'm not sure who that is
exactly. However, I don't think charities are appropriate vehicles for
self enrichment. If that was their goal, they should  have formed a
normal company.

 
I didn't say that was their goal, I said that they deserved reward. The
only person who seems to think this is some kind of mugging is you.

From the side of software development, I can see how their original
charity status might have motivated programmers to contribute to
improving open-source software support for the first Pis more than
for competitors that were always for-profit organisations. Since
people commonly quote good software support as the brand's key
advantage over other SBC manufacturers, it might be a bit insincere
to build a commercial company on top of that. But then it shouldn't
really be a surprise since Linux itself followed a similar path
with the commercial distros.

On that note it's interesting that they're still seemingly
leaving it to others to try and support their hardware in the
mainline Linux kernel (not just their fork of it), and for the RPi
5 it's actually a SUSE programmer who is doing the work on this:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SUSE-Upstream-Linux-RPi-5
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-5-RP1-Linux-RFC

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