Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London over New York
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Isn't an IPO kinda the opposite of that?
Or is is the fashionable thing these days to claim to be non-profit when you're young and looking for grassroots support, only to transform when there is money to be made?
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a shareholder in Raspberry Pi Ltd, not vice versa. It benefits from the profits generated by the commercial arm.
The commercial arm was established on 10 September 2012 [1].
[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
I don't see how it is the wrong way around: what you are saying is that they are a for-profit, and depending on how much profit they make with their business, the foundation gets more money to "play with", right?
But it can take a long time to make that scheme work at a level where the foundation can do what it would like to do so this IPO kind of gets a head start on those dividends, by selling some of the stock rather than to make a profit and wait they get some of that cash today, with the downside of being required to live in a glass house from now on and having somewhat reduced future dividends (assuming there are any).
Non-profits that sells things like a business aren't allowed.
At least that would be my understanding with a non-profit?
I don't know the precise structure, but Wikipedia is 'owned' by the wikimedia foundation.
It could be owned by Disney.
So the question is, who is the better custodian? A not for profit entity or a for profit one?
Raspberry pi is part owned by the raspberry pi foundation. The raspberry pi foundation shouldn't have a profit motive, so in that sense is a better custodian than some for profit 'holding company'.
No you could question, given they were prioritising business customers whether the foundation A) made the right decision or B) whether they have enough away over the company.
To me this all seems reminiscent of free software v open source.
A lot of people expected free(hard)ware, where it's becoming apparent it's more open source.
The problem with non-profits owning profit making businesses is that it makes governance a lot more complex, tends to create conflicts of interest etc.
You may not be satisfied with either of those choices, but that's a separate issue.
A non profit still needs funds. The need for funds is going to create conflicts.
Ultimately it come down to, do you want the millions that raspberry pi is making, going to some venture capitalist. Or do you want it going to some non profit.
If they do decide to milk the cash cow, at least that money is going somewhere hopefully better for society.
The charity still exists and still does all the same stuff: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...
Only once the Sony production line expanded did they get back on top of B2C supplies.
Throughout the shortage their blog regularly made statements like "If you are a B2B customer get in touch, we can still supply you with Pis".
In terms of their organisational structure, the charity does indeed still exist, but as I say it's a pretty small part of their business (and yes the charity exists for business) these days. Anyone active in Pi community circles will know that the consumer and education focus is very much going away, all be it slowly but that will no doubt pick up once they become listed and profits becomes the only focus.
There is still no evidence here... what you say is just that.
What guarantee is there that the newly publicly listed company won't be pressured by stockholders to improve the profit margins by driving up prices and reducing product quality on both the hardware and software fronts.
Isn't that what a public typical company do these days anyway? Or is there a sarcasm tone I am missing somehow?
Shifting to publicly listed means the owners are now the shareholders, it’s rare that public shareholders have zero board of directors representation, which is why I fear this is basically going to kill everything the Raspberry Pi Foundation have worked to build … the only question in my mind is how fast this kills it, I just can’t see how this won’t result in shareholders pressuring the company into compromising in the name of raw profit or whatever else is necessary for them to raise the stock price so the investors can get some profit.
* Couldn't select a current version of the OS to install on a Pi Zero. * Can't install the current version on an SSD that will run on a Pi 4B. An SSD install works. The same install on an SD card does work. * An install that runs on a Pi 5 won't run on a Pi 4B.
I asked about the first on their forum and my post was deleted before anyone could answer. No reason was given and I could find no where to ask.
The post was in no way critical or inflammatory. They just don't want to discuss problems with their stuff. There were a lot of changes in how the imager works and what happens on first boot and I suspect they are still catching up with related bugs.
Regardless, the Raspberry Pi for-profit arm has existed for over a decade now; the only news is that it wants to IPO.
1) the foundation, that does all the outreach, education and magazines
2) The commercial part (the actually makes the pis)
3) R&D
but it might be only two.
Either way I assume only the commercial part will float, leaving the foundation as the majority shareholder. It has the advantage of giving the foundation a couple of hundred million, which should allow it to continue to do great things. (if you think about computer/electronics education, its basically pi and scratch. Arduino has kinda dropped the ball.)
What you can get under $10 these days is mindblowing and if all Arduino ever did was make their IDE which ties 100's of different boards together under a common development experience then that would be enough for me.
While Arduino is strong in many regards and was a big improvement on the status quo when it came out in ~2005, they weren't very fast to respond to the rise of the esp8266 and super-low-cost boards made in China.
For a long time their cheapest product was the Uno R3 (with a 16 MHz 8-bit ATmega328) for about $25 while you could buy a Wemos D1 mini (with a 160 MHz 32-bit esp8266) for $2 - or an Uno clone on aliexpress for $3.
Arduino have updated their product line since then (the Uno R4 Minima offers a 48MHz 32-bit RA4M1 for $19) and it's understandable they wanted to retain compatibility with their 5v shield ecosystem. But they were definitely slow to respond to a changing market.
I agree. If anything its an understatement. I could, as a normal person outside academia, without a structured learning environment, do microcontrollers, affordably. Not only that, I could make amazing things with it.
sure there was the basic stamp, but that was well, basic.
Doesn't that count as marketing?
You answered your question: it was. :-(
They've gone from a fun project and education focused company who was mostly operating under their non-profit arm to better education, to a B2B enterprise supplier with a heavy handed and sometimes outright hatred to their original user base.
For a proof of concept, pop onto their forums, create an account and make a post asking how to do something fairly basic, see how quickly you get yelled at and banned for life.
Sad but it remains true, Thing is created > Small but devoted group discovers and popularized thing > Thing raises to mass popularity > The masses what to change the thing to be what they think it "should be" diverging from what the small but devoted group desired or signed on for > Thing becomes unrecognizable to the original group > New thing is created > Small but devoted group.... and the cycle continues
So the question is what will replace the Pi for the hacker community, I personally stopped buying Pi's for my personal projects a long time ago, rPI3 was the last one for me. Soo many other manufactures of SBC's out there making better, cheaper boards.
*like, just random example, the Radxa Rock 3 https://youtu.be/KghZIgkKZcs
Is china the only nations making "trash"....
Further your video shows off several replacements with 1 having some kind of incompatibility with some carrier boards... Personally I have never been a fan of the Compute Module form factor anyway.. I prefer the full SBC boards. I think the Compute Module form factor lends itself to more complexity and issues.
The SBC Market is huge now, and sure you can point to market failures, companies that dont survive, products that get abandoned every market will have those, and I see that as a GOOD THING. not a bad thing.
That is capitalism, which I love, at work.
But fine-- in my trash bin you'll find a Cubietruck, an Asus Tinkerboard, a MangoPi MQ-Pro, and several other Chinese SoC compute sticks. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me 5 times, shame on me. All were basically given up on by the original manufacturer, and some had some degree of support through Armbian (albeit with numerous features lost due to being walled off behind some inscrutable binary blob).
The current alternative darling of the SBC enthusiast world, the Rockchip RK3588[S], does not have mainline kernel support and depends on a faux-5.x-series frankenkernel provided by Rockchip. Mainline support has been coming Real Soon Now for at least a year, and is in theory making progress, but I can't spend promises at the supermarket.
If capitalism works by selling people a piece of shit that barely does what it's supposed to do at launch, doesn't have mainline support, and is consigned to the dustbin after a single dev cycle or two because the manufacturer has moved on to the next piece of shit they will sell to the next mark and then abandon shortly thereafter, then I guess I'm anti-capitalism now. They tell me it used to be about making money by selling a decent product, rather than selling obsolescence-at-launch, thereby scamming people by design. I don't need that kind of capitalism, but there's a lot of it coming out of China these days.
Meanwhile the only problem I ever had with Raspberry Pi boards was a camera socket that eventually went bad on one RPi3... and this is across probably 12-15 boards. The software support has always been there, and the hardware itself has always been pretty solid. And this is despite the fact that they use a weird closed Broadcom chipset with a weird architecture and weird bootup sequence.
This doesn't need the moderators to be secretly part of some plan to make money.
I stopped posting questions on physics stack exchange years ago because what I was curious about vastly exceeded my ability to phrase those questions in a way that didn't sound like a crank, let alone be coherent, precise, and meaningful within the language of physics. Basically, I was writing like ChatGPT years before it existed.
In one case, I even managed to get a "no", "yes" (in a comment) and "closed: duplicate" all on the same question.
(IIRC, this particular comment was subsequently re-opened because one of the stack exchange moderators is also a HN commenter and noticed last time I said this; I don't blame the moderators for me being an enthusiastic fool).
- https://community.element14.com/products/raspberry-pi/f/foru... (lots of similar reports of weird bans)
- https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/raspberry-pi-forums-banne... (a few people reporting similar cases / reasons for being banned here)
- https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=38424 (mod even confirms questioning mods will get you banned)
- https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=78285
And somewhat unrelated to the forum, there's this https://eiara.nz/posts/2022/Dec/09/a-case-study-on-raspberry... which highlights the issues with the main person who's caused their forums and community to have such a hostile attitude towards its users. The followup interview will let you draw your own conclusions about the head of their social team... https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/raspb...
What a ride. The entire story is nuts, from the start (of hiring an ex-cop and have him brag about covert devices, against a user base of traditionally cop-critical nerds) over the completely messed up response to critics over the conspiracy theory spreading and the "being ex cop is like being a Chinese woman" statement in the end.
I've banned people a as moderator, and some of them have gone on to spread complete falsehoods about this. While I'm not saying there is not a problem or that all accounts are incorrect, I find it very hard to trust these accounts from random anonymous internet people. Especially not the type of person who goes off on rants that RaspberryPi is all a scam from Broadcom (or ... something) because that seems exactly the sort of person that should be banned.
Hell, one of those links was just a new user mistakenly banned because they looked like a spambot, which was resolved quickly. That sort of thing that happens all the time. Did you even read your own links?
Arduino on the other hand, open sources the hardware, meaning very cheap but less powerful SBCs from companies in China (and elsewhere).
They should be doing the same as they have the ecosystem and resources to mass produce very cheap boards, but the Pi is prohibitively expensive, and it looks like they cater to companies first and prioritise making a profit.
You can easly get to $150 without a monitor when going with a pi vs a lower cost second hand mini pc which is more powerful and upgradable, and can run linux or windows. They've priced themselves out of the education market.
What about a Raspberry Pi 1b, a W2 or a Pico? These are all devices that are great for learning computing. Kids can learn on a cheap £20 kit plugged into a TV.
So what if it's used? So what if it's a few years old? The drive, the purpose of these educational projects is to get kids onto them. Doesn't have to be the latest, by any means.
Huge fan but I just hope this tech IPO that the LSE has been looking for doesn't turn out to be a total dud.
Guess there will be some AI angle in the investor road shows!
Arduino makes completely different types of computers.
Being a listed company is a source of all kinds of distractions.
""" it will let Raspberry Pi's not-for-profit side expand by "at least a factor of 2X." """
Plus, full: """
The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi's not-for-profit side expand by "at least a factor of 2X." And while it's "an understandable thing" that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, "while I'm involved in running the thing, I don't expect people to see any change in how we do things." """
Yeah, sure, running a public company requires no changes to how things are done ... /s
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/raspberry-pi-is-prep...
I'm curious how this will affect the foundation's mission, but I guess they are already affected by the outside investments from previous fundraising rounds.
I think there was a religious component to health foods at the time. But not sure why. One popular and possibly inaccurate reason was that bland vegetarian foods decreased the bodys animal nature.
I must admit , I worry going public might actually be a bad thing for the Pi org. Exposure to the winds of quarterly earnings reports and hardware timelines can often conflict...
I have no real evidence to support that feeling, but I have it just the same.
Excited to see where this leads!
It isn't rare for there to be a lock-up period before existing stock holders are able to sell their shares on the market to avoid people dumping stock they know is worth less than the float price. This is because there is a fair chance that those closely involved with the company have a better long term view on what the company will do than the market so it takes a while to get any post float surprises to be priced in. That's one reason why IPOs tend to be tricky to price: overprice and the stock will drop after the float and those that bought the IPO will feel burned, underprice and you're leaving money on the table.
At the end of the day I'm not going to be too critical in any case as I've contributed nothing beyond buying a few boards and making a few posts in support!
Loads of copy cats and the 5 generation feels like it’s at the edge of what the market can bear pricing wise.
Idk I just don’t see the IPO rationale
Not saying they're all universally garbage, but you get what you pay for: the RPi folks manage cost very carefully, whereas most of the copycats are just trying to undercut on price, and will never follow through with the kind of software support the RPi folks continue to provide after over a decade. Consider that the original Raspberry Pi 1 model -- released 12 years ago -- is still fully supported by Raspberry Pi OS. I'd be surprised if most of the copycats support their boards for more than a few years at most.
RPi's for-profit arm mostly deals with B2B sales, and courts the kinds of customers that require long-term support as table stakes. I don't think most of them would touch the copycats with a 10-foot pole.
>whereas most of the copycats are just trying to undercut on price
Some of them, at the premium end its the other way round. Copy cats are fielding much better hardware...at a price premium. e.g. pi5 vs orange pi 5+
8gb max vs 32gb max
1gbe vs 2.5gbe
sd card vs native nvme
BCM2712 vs RK3588
pcie gen 2 vs pcie gen 3
16nm lith vs 8nm
That's not to hate on the rasp...but they're just not in as strong a position anymore as they were in early pi3/4 days where they were the only game in town and competitively priced to boot.
1- https://www.acmesystems.it/FOXLX
> And I see a lot of other reports of others' experiences that seem to back that up.
There's a lot of misinformation about other hardware, especially on some forums, and I'd be extremely suspicious about the authenticity of some comments.