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The Raspberry Pi was invented to be an accessible open platform that people could modify on their own terms, wasn’t it?

And then they got some capital injections and started caring more about the commercial side, didn’t they?

They have been doing this from almost the beginning - weird firmware/GPU blobs, camera interface hardware DRM, etc.

Money and greed has been at the first place from the beginning.

Maybe I’m being charitable, but my impression was that originally they only had access to non-open gpu chips and therefore were forced to have black-box gpu blobs

IIRC it was something like that & even if initially understandable, IIRC it did not really make sense to continue doing that once they were famous enough & had some money to work with (to e.g. pick a more open chip).

That that still have a closed source firmware, which makes it possible for them to pull off the bullshit discussed in the article & this discussion - that proves there was & still is a shady undertone under all that openness facade of the RPi foundation. :P

> once they were famous enough & had some money to work with (to e.g. pick a more open chip).

This is where I tapped out. They could have done so much to open the industry for makers once they had traction but instead they went the other way. Disappointing at best.

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