Lance Howarth has joined Raspberry Pi as Foundation CEO

raspberrypi.org

10 points·mkup··4 comments

At time of writing, the submission title is: "Raspberry Pi is no longer non-profit organization"

This is not true. As stated in the post, Raspberry Pi Foundation has a for-profit subsidiary. The Foundation now has a new CEO.

Edit: Submission title better reflects the OP now.

Raspberry Pi probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't a nonprofit. It will be interesting to see what changes. Putting your pocketbook ahead of doing the world a favor often leads to a minimization of innovation and a maximization of profit.

I would take issue with this as the commercial success of Raspberry Pi has enabled them to do so much more than they would have otherwise. Look at it as a nominal vs real problem. In your version, success leads them to focus more on trading, clearly to the detriment of "doing the world a favor". In my version, commercial success a) provides previously unimaginable levels of funding for the foundation, and b) puts more Raspberry Pi into the world, which in its own right furthers the goal of increasing child computer education simply by making them more accessible.

From the blog post it looks like the non-profit will be "recommending" the Raspberry Pi for children while the commercial arm reaps the rewards. This is no different from Microsoft pushing its products in schools.

What if a better and cheaper device appears on the scene? Will the Raspberry Pi Foundation recommend it to schools? Probably not. It will never be truly independent from the commercial arm.

I was quite interested in buying a Raspberry Pi but will now examine all the competing devices and make a purchase purely based on the hardware. I appreciate everything they've done but I think we can all put aside the notion that supporting the Raspberry Pi will be doing "good".

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