Raspberry Pi Purpose Debate
The cluster discusses the original educational and hobbyist mission of the Raspberry Pi, questioning its openness due to Broadcom's proprietary hardware and GPU, and debates its shift towards commercial and business priorities over individual users.
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Could you please elaborate on how Raspberry Pi's approach is an issue?
Wasn't the whole point of Raspberry Pi being cheap and accessible?
What makes the RPi "hobby hardware"?
Why does Broadcom subsidize Raspberry Pi?
Given that I (and everyone I've spoken to) thought that one of the main goals for the Raspberry Pi was to provide an open platform for childrens education and development (right or wrong, this is how it was marketed to me and quite a few others that I know personally) it makes me feel a bit like I've been had. If it's not an open platform why are we supporting it? What's the difference between this and insert a n other board? Cheapness? I can get that with an MSP430. Linux? I can get that elsewh
It's pretty simple. The RPi is an advertising campaign for Broadcom's VideoCore IV processor, which is part of why the RPi is so cheap. Broadcom is uncomfortable with the reality that software is eating hardware, so they've decided to artificially bolster the value of their hardware by selling it back to you incrementally with their own buggy software. Until they lose interest in maintaining it, of course.
People buy Raspberry Pi's for the first class GPIO support and GPIO ecosystem.
Supporting a proprietary platform on Raspberry Pi kind of defeats the point of the openness on which Raspberry Pi was built, no?
That was the reason the Raspberry Pi was made iirc
I thought the raspberry pi was meant to be an educational diy system? Prioritizing businesses over hobbyists seems to go against that.