The real tragedy is the proprietary bootcode.bin gpu code that is a blackbox and we don't have the source code for.
How horrible that a tinkering/hobbies project has to have these hidden secret blackboxes that can't be modified.
How horrible that a tinkering/hobbies project has to have these hidden secret blackboxes that can't be modified.
The Pi firmware is ThreadX, later bought by Microsoft and renamed Azure RTOS.
It is now FOSS.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/microsoft_opens_sourc...
That does not mean the whole Pi firmware is automatically FOSS -- drivers are not -- but they could if they wanted.
IIRC it's just that the bootcode.bin file is provided by Broadcom, and not the RPi foundation, so they can't open source it because they don't have the license to do so (this isn't the only proprietary blob in the default Pi distribution, but most of the other ones have open source alternatives/aren't that necessary/are open source now that they use the RP1 chip instead of broadcom peripherals).
There's similar, slightly more open arrangements, with the Pi Pico W, where they can't provide the firmware for the Wifi chip, but they can provide a library to interface with it, with the caveat that the license _only_ allows for that library to be used with the RP* family of microcontrollers [1]
[1]: https://github.com/georgerobotics/cyw43-driver/blob/faf36381...