Raspberry Pi Plans $500m Spring Listing

- Raise prices

- Ask for donations

- Allow for pre-orders

Because, in the end, investors will not "fund" the business for "charity". They will expect profit and multipliers on the company value. So, in the end, they will still have to raise prices, have more proprietary things or cut corners...

It is an important part of an economy and helps reduce scarcity by bringing a product's price closer to what it should be is a market economy.

A vendor doesn't know what the free market price for something is. They have to guess, this is speculative. If they guess low they get shortages and if they guess high they have unsold inventory.

The scalper is doing you a service. They're securing you access to a scarce product. You're paying for that service. You are also deciding that the benefit of this is worth more than the price you're paying for it. In exchange, the scalper is rewarded the difference between cost and secondary sale price. Remember, the scalper is also speculating that they know better than the original vendor what the item's sale price should be. If correct they are rewarded for this risk.

Then buy a Beaglebone?

The problem that the Beaglebone folks bumped into is that if you don't make the hardware stupid cheap (<$20, and probably <$10), people won't buy it and form a community around it.

Of course, if you make it too cheap, then you really don't want to sell all that many of them since you're losing money on each one.

There's loads of pi clones and cheap SBCs out there - Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Olimex etc. But none of them have got the traction - and most crucially, the community support - of the RPi.

Maybe if a Chinese company with the same level of community involvement and support (Pine?) launched, they would have a real competitor. But right now it seems like there's endless clone SBCs, none of which have any real traction.