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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

I mean, you're not wrong and it is open source at the app layer but it's not like Raspberry Pi is a purely software product. They're a hardware company, acting like a maker friendly, open source device - similar to Arduino (which btw is totally open source, even the bootloader and you can get data sheets for every single component on it), but it falls short with only the top app layer being open source. The middle layer (HAL, drivers, etc.) is all closed source. And hardware is closed source.

It's ok to be closed source IMO, but they should not be marketing themselves like Arduino folks.

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Arduino is a for-profit company with open source hardware; Raspberry Pi is a charity with closed-source hardware.

Nothing wrong with either approach. But your comment makes out they're a for-profit company with closed-source hardware acting like the good guys.

Not sure it's fair to label them as just another company when they're not-for-profit and pump all their money into a) product development and b) education programmes.

To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding.

> To be honest, if the Pi was open source hardware, everyone would buy the clones (like they do with the Arduino ones) and the charity side would have much less funding.

As opposed to now, when people buy such totally-not-clones as the Banana Pi and Orange Pi? For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.

>For that matter, Arduino seems to somehow have stayed profitable in spite of getting murdered from every angle by the clones.

The clones are fine for simple stuff. But they really cut every corner possible, so even the chip is counterfeit, which means it doesn't behave like a real Arduino does. Deep sleep will use 1000x as much current on some clones compared to a real Arduino, for example.

You really can't only use clones. You have to develop/test on real Arduino hardware, then deploy to clones. Because the clones aren't reliable in their behavior.

The thing helping the Raspberry Pi fend off clones is their deal with Broadcom, not whether the board, firmware, and boot code are open or closed source. It's easy to copy the board and binary blobs either way. The closed nature of the boot code hurts tinkering without helping sales.

It's true that Broadcom is the reason why most clones are not as good as the Raspberry Pi but it is not because of the boot code. It's because Broadcom has a custom graphics chip that has nothing in common with the official ARM GPUs. Any effort into open sourcing the very popular Raspberry Pi will not help open sourcing other boards that have the way more common Mali GPUs. Raspberry Pis are their own island so to speak.

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