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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Supporting a proprietary platform on Raspberry Pi kind of defeats the point of the openness on which Raspberry Pi was built, no?

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The Raspberry Pi may be openwashed, but it's not really that open.

edit: oh no, I've run afoul of the Broadcom shills. Oh well.

True assessment or not, it's not a compelling reason in itself to encourage less free use(r)s of it.

Beg pardon? The parent post was whining that running Windows wasn't in the open spirit of the project. The project was never open in a meaningful way, so it doesn't seem like a problem at all to do so.

I'm not encouraging any particular software package, simply correcting a misconception.

Unfortunately, there are a few parts of RPi that are closed, like the GPU, if I recall correctly, but I do agree with you that it sort of goes against the philosophy of tinkering that openness brings.

There is a reasonable Gallium / Mesa driver for the GPU on the way; for simple OpenGL / OpenCL workloads it works reasonably well. It is being actively worked on so it is still improving.

https://wiki.freedesktop.org/dri/VC4/

The GPU is only partially closed. Unfortunately, the part of the GPU that's closed and requires a binary blob is the bit that boots the Pi, so you have to use closed-source code in order to do anything with the Pi at all - even stuff that doesn't use the GPU.

I don't see how you can practically have an open platform and then close it off to proprietary things.

The commenter isn't saying it should be blocked, they're saying it's against the spirit of openness.

They were talking about "Supporting a proprietary platform", and I assumed they meant the hardware supporting Windows. If the hardware supporting Windows is somehow bad, that implies removing that support would be better.

Maybe I'm wrong and they mean a person or organization, in which case I'm not sure who they mean. Windows does not appear on the official Raspberry Pi website front page or blog.

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