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Raspberry PI's SOC is made by Broadcom. They did a decent job in open source that part. I heard even the GPU driver/library was opensource for PI.

GPU driver/library was definitively not opensource for the Freescale's IMX6 as far as I know.

Feel free to point out other issues with Broadcom opensource.

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the RPI is an exception, it did not come easy.

Freescale would love to open its GPU etc, however it is licensing the IP from other vendors that Freescale has no right to open source it, yes it would be nice if Freescale can get that part work. Otherwise, Freescale is fairly open on everything it owns and makes.

The Raspberry Pi having a non-closed bootchain, let alone a free driver is a feat of tens of thousands of people pressuring Broadcom, and a few people doing the hard work to free as much of the RPI as they could.

Having to run Raspbian just to boot the board was a dark time!

>Having to run Raspbian just to boot the board was a dark time!

Is this some sort of joke I am missing becuase now the pi can run more than just raspbian?

What? I used to run 9front(a plan9 fork) on raspberry pi back in 2013. Their bootloader is closed source, so you have to use that to load your kernel.

That was the old Broadcom. The new company was formed in 2015 from acquisition by Avago Technologies.

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