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Comment by fnordfnordfnord | Hacker News Reader

>"Earlier today, Broadcom announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license. The source release targets the BCM21553 cellphone chip, but it should be reasonably straightforward to port this to the BCM2835, allowing access to the graphics core without using the blob. As an incentive to do this work, we will pay a bounty of $10,000 to the first person to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers. "

At last!

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Just $10,000? Nice gesture, but they can afford to dig a little deeper. Their card running Quake III at reasonable frame rate on a Pi is a big deal, and these cheap skates know it. (I hope the person who figures it out, doesn't give them the code; just show them and collect $10,000 (A years rent in a bad part of Oakland).

(a) They are a charity.

(b) They demonstrated the Pi running Quake 3 at a reasonable frame rate in 2011. There's a picture of it in the blog post.

(c) The competition rules say "To submit an Entry, and Entrant shall email a link to a public GitHub repository containing the full source code for the Entry..." so just showing the result wouldn't be eligible to win. That and they already know what it looks like, because of (b).

They aren't really a charity; they sell a product from a manufacturer (the Broadcom SoC) and were started by Broadcom employees. So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom.

They are a UK-registered charity organization, and the Raspberry Pi is much more than just the Broadcom SoC.

Whatever RasPi is, the fact remains that they're selling a relatively open platform at price near production costs. And that platform just got significantly more open.

And they are now offering a bounty for the creation (refinement, really) of more free software. Which will benefit the entire community surrounding the RasPi. So that is good. Even if they were offering $10 USD, there might be someone who'll take up the challenge just to get the bragging rights.

"Relatively open" in the way that your mother was "relatively pregnant" when you were born?

Are you suggesting he's a premie?

No, I'm suggesting that "relatively open" is semantically null.

No, I'm suggesting that "relatively open" is semantically null.

I don't know if you are familiar with the embedded world, but a large percentage of the offerings (specifically system on chip or SoC) have NDA requirements for the documentation.

And many of these platforms don't have a decent Linux port, even though they could support it.

Even with SoC vendors such as TI, the graphics core for the OMAP4 (for example) is a binary blob. There is no documentation for that, and no hope that situation to change (in part because TI has exited the mobile phone market).

Please tell us of your mobile platform experience, and what vendors you consider open or closed.

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409)"

>So, in a way, this "charity" is really just a marketing subsidiary of Broadcom.

You could look at it that way if you like. But if you compare the rPi to the comparable low-priced educational development boards available when the project started (none). You might conclude that their marketing effort had a good and very real effect on the availability of low-cost edu dev-kits for both Broadcom SoC products and others' as well (like the BBB). So, as both an educator and Open Source advocate, I am fairly pleased with the rPi project, and even if it isn't exactly what I would have wished for I can't imagine how it could have been more successful or had a better result.

rPi is probably the most aggressively priced, but you talk about it like that market didn't exist. The BeagleBoard is probably the closest, though that was designed more as a dev-board for ARM processors and not a mini-computer like the Pi.

>but you talk about it like that market didn't exist.

For most practical purposes, it didn't. What existed were either inferior to rPi and more expensive (>4x) or approximately equivalent and much more expensive (>8x). It has had a significant positive impact on the way instruction is given.

In that case everyone in the industry is a charity case. Almost every invention, from the advent of integrated circuits, digital signal processors, LCD displays, even Google all the way up to the Internet itself — came from publicly funded research projects. In the computer industry in particular the "you didn't build that" claim is probably more true than anywhere else. Shoulders of giants, folks.

Q3 is already running on the Pi using the proprietary drivers. This competition is for porting these new open sourced drivers to the Pi and using them to run Q3.

It could be that $10,000 is the amount some mid-to-high level manager can probably write off.

Also $10,000 is a significant amount of money.

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