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The author says a lot of traditional software won't run on the Raspberry Pi, because it uses ARM.

Maybe that's true for proprietary software. But the Pi can run any open-source project you throw at it. I used one as an (admittedly slow) development box for a while.

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Nitpicking, but there is no inherent quality about "open-source" that makes software support the Pi.

That inherent quality is the ability to compile ARM binaries from that openly-available source code.

Exactly. Because Debian is a collection of open-source software, it was able to be retargeted for ARMv6 and the Raspberry Pi, in the form of Raspbian.

Some open-source software can't work on ARM, but it's in the minority. Code in high-level languages is generally not tied to a particular processor architecture.

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