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Comment by cf141q5325 | Hacker News Reader

I read an interesting counterpoint in the IpFire forum. Among other points

>Now, everybody is looking for a cheap ARM board with performance and loads of features. The Raspberry Foundation is a charity that pays probably no tax at all, but somehow is selling lots and lots of boards at an absolutely “amazing” price.

>Amazing because nobody else in Europe can compete with them. Paying no taxes helps. The second step is that they have almost completely outsourced their software development. They call it Open Source-ed, but that is not the same.

>Over many years, there has never been a release of that piece of hardware that was supported by a mainline kernel. Neither Linux nor any other of the *BSDs. They simply do not care what software runs on it.

https://community.ipfire.org/t/arm-sbc-support-discussion/26... Post number 4

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I thought the organization was split in two, a Raspberry Pi foundation/non-profit that was tasked with the original mission (cheap computing for all people of the world), and a Raspberry Pi company with CEO (Eben Upton), board, etc. driven to be a successful company that produces the Pi.

Here's the foundation: https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/

Here's the company: https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/

Thanks for the heads up. There seems to have been a past thread on a similar topic, when the Ltd announced its IPO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392649

Its a structure like Mozillla, meaning the company is fully owned by the foundation

first time I've seen someone complain about being outcompeted by a charity...

what's next? Glaxo complaining about the Wellcome Trust?

He is making a solid cause and effect description though. About something i hadnt thought about from this perspective before. Namely that by its size it heavily influences the market and its trajectory. The effect is not so different from big companies being able to sell a products at a loss. At the end of the day the existence of the Pi likely played a role in why we dont have a good open source equivalent yet, because it hampers the business models that could finance the necessary development through an institutional advantage.

And i dont have to look further then what i use my Pis for and how much that fits the description of a charitycase. I use it because its cheap and do it despite the sad state of the code base. I dont want to talk you out of your righteous indignation but i think its something interesting to think about. The upsides dont mean there are no negative effects. At the end of the day the complexity and workload for new open source projects is limited. You have only so much spare time. At a certain point you need a business model to get you to a level that allows adaptation which might move it further. There was a interesting thread about it earlier about how many giant projects started as a few week solo project. Think Unix or Git. The more complex hardware gets, the more difficult that gets for anything outside of the monoliths due to enormous entry hurdles. And at the end of the day the Pi doesnt run a mainline kernel and its boot process needs a blob. Its in competition with any open source platforms, be it in sales or developer time, that dont have the same advantage. The fact that they do amazing work doesnt change that.

edit: Not a summary but what i took away from it.

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