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Comment by mangecoeur | Hacker News Reader

So the RPi foundation deliver the first mass-market hackable board, capturing the imaginations of children and adults alike to start delving into the guts of computing instead of seeing computers as magic black boxes, make barebones devices easily purchasable where previously you could only by via B2B channels, pour money, heart, and soul into doing public outreach, educational materials, and more, and keep updating the system to provide accessible mass-market devices to tinkerers the world over.

But their entire work is 'lipstick on a pig' because they used an ugly hack to work around the byzantine mess that is embedded firmware code and licensing, and people should go out and buy another board whose entire existence is only possible because RPi demonstrated the market existed. Way to go giving people credit for their hard work..

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The part that always bothers me about it is, yes, OK, so there's this other board with twice the hardware and for not much more money that checks all of Richard Stallman's loyalty boxes.

But what the fuck do I do with it? No one's out there writing software for your obscure embedded-systems evaluation board. There's no pre-packaged SD images out there to let me play with different OSes. There's no ecosystem of cool plug-in hardware to play with and do fun things with.

The cool thing about the RPi is not just the card itself or how cheap it is, it's all the stuff around it.

Some guy ranting about how it's not as cool and open as this random board GPX5-3520-V2-a from Hardware Maker In China I've Never Heard Of that I'll have to hand port and code every piece of software for, is the same blind category error that Slashdotter types have been making for years about Linux.

Your magic "open" box doesn't mean shit if there's nothing I can do with it.

>> Some guy ranting about how it's not as cool and open as this random board GPX5-3520-V2-a from Hardware Maker In China I've Never Heard Of that I'll have to hand port and code every...

Some guy talking about porting fedora support to it, so no, you wouldn't have to do any of this.

In my experience, those "some guys" do a lot of just that: talking. If they get code out to the public, it's utterly undocumented, the source code is unintelligible, and fails to compile or install most of the time, but everything's fine according to him because "it works on my hardware."

The "some guy" in this case is a well known Linux developer, working for Red Hat (last I heard).

He's not a clueless, random noobie. ;)

My last Linux machine was a Fujitsu lifebook, and the best ACPI firmware available for it was on Windows. The second best one was mine, cobbled together from a guy who solved less than half the problems, a guy who no longer had a Lifebook, and an idea from another guy to try to backport things from a later model.

I probably blew a hundred hours of weekends and weeknights to get 50 minutes of run time out of my machine and something like five people benefited from it.

When Apple came out with a 13" laptop that was less than a pound heavier (with the real battery, not that shitty fake one that was 90 minutes of run time) and happened to run a video game I was interested in, I said screw this and jumped ship.

And suddenly I understood those guys who had been showing up to tech meetups for a year or two with MacBooks. I can spend all my time futzing with my machine like a classic car aficionado, or I can get out and enjoy doing things with it. Once I realized that I had never actually wanted to learn Linux, I just wanted to use it to learn other things, I couldn't go back.

I still occasionally maintain Linux boxes, and sometimes bash, find or sed is the answer to a problem, but with the exception of Docker you literally have to pay me to use it.

So...it will eventually be usable. Great, let me know when.

Already is according to the site for the board, it has ubuntu and android booting.

I hardly think that vaporware constitutes a valid counterpoint.

Ubuntu is already available for that board. It's a perfectly valid counterpoint.

> blind category error that Slashdotter types have been making for years about Linux

I think It's safe to call if "for decades" now. 1.85 decades is close enough to count.

>> So the RPi foundation deliver the first mass-market hackable board

I take issue with this.

They certainly managed to capture people's interest but they were not the first and they absolutely still have black boxes on their devices. And no, there were many previous devices available through normal online retail channels.

The 'Plug Computing' phenomenon from a few years previously, while not on the same scale, did some of this.

And did you even read the article linked? At no point does the author say their entire work is lipstick on a pig, just that some of the way the Pi 3 works may class that way.

Open(ish) embedded computing existed before the Pi, they did good work taking it more mainstream, but please don't credit them with everything.

I remember hearing about the Beagleboard for years before the Pi, along with the Plug machines and Gumstix (if I'm remembering correctly; never really dug into those at all). I think the RPi's greatest innovations have been their educational goals and (crucially) the price point. I think that most of the boards before it were marketed as hacker/dev boards and priced accordingly, and they were correspondingly more niche products.

It certainly wasn't the first hackable SBC, but I think adding "mass-market" into the claim makes it defensible. There's a parallel to the Arduino, in my mind. It wasn't the first microcontroller dev board, but it was the one that made that microcontrollers look cool to outsiders.

Well the first go around they really tried hard to hit a very ambitious price point and they ended up having to cut some corners and they sorta ended up with this chip that everyone seems to think is a bit of a mess...

It seems like version 2 or version 3 they could have gotten something a little less goofy. They have the clout to be able to make some good deals with any supplier. So you can sorta see why that people are frustrated b/c so much community effort is being spent on something that's sorta.. goofy. I wish there was the same community drive behind the ODROID boards for instance

Doesn't help that the community around it is kind of toxic. They have a history of blaming end-users for problems caused by the Pi itself (like the keyboard and mouse issues and the SD card compatibility issues), insulting users who can't figure out how to get it working (which is incredibly difficult for non-technical users), promoting it to non-technical users for purposes like media playback and then blaming them for trying to use it like that and failing because obviously it's their fault for using it for something it's not designed for, etc.

Their community is a bit of a mixed bag. There are definitely some good people in there that help users fix problems, but I've seen the open hostility you're referring to as well, in my case I got posts about the progress of Android on the RPi removed by a moderator of their forums. If you go to the RPi forums now you'll find that the Android subforum has broken CSS. I have a PM from a mod indicating this was an intentional decision.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=73

If they're so concerned about protecting their mission, I don't see why they encourage use of Kodi (well I do understand it, it sells boards, but Android support could be a good selling point too).

Woah woah, hold up a second here. It sounds like you're saying that someone who has sufficient enough access to change the html code on the Android sub-section of the RPi official forums has intentionally broken the display rendering because they... just don't want to deal with it? or, are tired of people asking about Android on the Pi(s)?

Edit: by blindly clicking around I found a post from a Foundation member that said they were locking the forum. Dated mid-March 2015, so i guess the css wouldn't matter anyway

> "so i guess the css wouldn't matter anyway"

As I said, I have proof via a PM from a forum mod that the CSS on that subforum was intentionally broken (it'd be easy to fix). The aim was to discourage any discussion of Android on the Raspberry Pi, as they saw it as going against the aims of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (the suggestion being that if students had access to Android they'd mostly use it with Android). There were three parts to blocking those discussions. First was to lock the Android subforum. Second was to mess up the CSS on that subforum so it was harder to use as an archive. Third was to lock/remove threads across all forums (including General Discussion) that were about Android on RPi.

If you don't believe me, try posting a thread on the Raspberry Pi General Discussion subforum about some recent Android on the Raspberry Pi progress:

http://www.ubuntufree.com/watch-android-6-0-marshmallow-and-...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=63&sid=4a...

It's not that I don't believe you, the questions were genuine, it's just that it seems like an extreme solution to do in a behind-closed-doors, almost underhanded, fashion. I was under the impression that it was a supposed "open" hardware platform geared towards education and enabling kids to get into low-level computing. Android is incredibly popular among that demographic, and if they want to use the Pi to create things for Android, why stop them?

One thing I don't understand for example is the hostility against every single competitor out there and everyone that dares to say something critical about the RPI. The latter I find strange seeing they constantly improve these devices.

If it is really about education, get small inexpensive devices in the hands of millions, children... does things should be welcomed. Hell some of them attack a guy that wants to experiment with a different open source OS, that seems extremely conflicting with an open platform from my POV.

For me it is the opposite of being "open", seems more a marketing ploy to me.

The original BegalBoard predated the Raspberry Pi by about 5 years and the gumstix before it. The real difference between all these products is that the price of all the components has come down a lot and the market segments they target.

Where did the author talk bad about "their entire work"? He is (IMHO understandably) disappointed with a specific aspect of it and recognized that "They are of course correct for their use case". He says nothing bad about 1) bringing out the boards at all, 2) the community work, 3) ...

Where did the author talk bad about "their entire work"?

Everywhere he said "the Raspberry Pi 3" he's referring to the product as a whole, which is the culmination of all the work the Raspberry Pi Foundation has done to date, ergo the entire article is about their entire work. If he has a problem with only a small part of it then he would have said "the Raspberry Pi 3's bootloader blob" instead.

Hm, I wouldn't see the Raspberry Pi 3 as the "culmination of all their work", but as a tiny part of it. The specific hardware IMHO is the most boring part of what they do. There are tons of cheap-ish ARM dev boards now, there always were in many ways "technically" better boards, for most purposes it doesn't matter that much what the specific Raspberry Pi X looks like (I was really surprised they came out with the 3 so fast, it didn't seem necessary to me). What's interesting in my eyes is the publicity, community, and ecosystem they've managed to attract.

Their most impressive achievement is growing such a large community. The product is a bit of a cute fallacy, very odd SoC / board. False price point, buy an old laptop and you have keyboard / lcd / wireless / case / psu / maybe even a battery for 50$. The form factor and power consumption was nice but unrelated to the original goal which was teaching programming, which you can do as easily on said old laptop. Missing part ? exposed IO pins.

"So the RPi foundation deliver the first mass-market hackable board,..."

I notice this type of negative comment about inexpensive, "hackable" hardware freqently on HN. As if the fact that a piece of hardware is inexpensive and "hackable" is insignificant. Perhaps to these commenters, it is. But to others it may be signifcant.

A pocket-sized computer with networking that boots _either_ a GNU/Linux project, a BSD project or Plan 9, not to mention a few other open source OS, from an SD card. For me, this is the major advance and appeal of the RPi.

Far from perfect but still a major advance from the previous status quo, IMHO. Thank you RPi.

In a sense RPi is a market maker. Now they have to find ways to compete in the market they made.

I see your kind of opinion in HN a lot and it makes me really sad.

Every time I feel like somebody has peed into the pool of all the perfect outcomes.

Yes, what the RPi foundation did was great, but it was not magnificent and everyone has the bloody right to voice their opinion about it.

Edit: also RPi actually destroyed some very specific and interesting ecosystems.

Which ecosystems?

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