Linked by Howard Fosdick on Sat 24th Nov 2012 04:12 UTC
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RE[2]: RPi is still open-source hostile.
by zima on Tue 27th Nov 2012 10:26
in reply to "RE: RPi is still open-source hostile."
I also would like to have a fully-open ARM SoC but please be fair. RPi guys have already done more than their share of promoting open ARM systems. It is not their job to produce SoCs with open drivers.
To be fair, they basically just took the "nearest" SoC available - the Broadcom R&D bureau ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphamosaic ) responsible for RPi SoC is a stone's throw away from RPi headquarters.
There are also some personal ties involved (one of RPi founders/directors working at Broadcom)




Member since:
2009-06-30
It isn't. Read the whole discussion (and several before) and you'll see they just got tired of dealing with a troll.
Raspberry Pi is about as open source friendly as most off-the-shelf PCs. Yes, you need firmware (BIOS) to bootstrap your OS and, yes, you need a closed-source GPU driver if you need accelerated video. But other than that it is a fully open platform. There are plenty of things you can do with the device without touching GPU (frankly speaking, if you wanted to do something performance intensive you should avoid these devices anyway).
I also would like to have a fully-open ARM SoC but please be fair. RPi guys have already done more than their share of promoting open ARM systems. It is not their job to produce SoCs with open drivers.