As expected earlier this year, Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London. Back then, CEO Eben Upton said he did not expect the IPO to change how Raspberry Pi did things, but history tells us that initial public offerings tend to, well, change how companies do things. In their official announcement that they intend to hold an IPO, there’s an incredibly interesting and telling contradiction, as noted by @yassie_j on MastoAkkoma:
Raspberry Pi, in their listing press release, says: The Enthusiast and Education market is the “heart” of the Raspberry Pi movement.
But also says: Industrial and Embedded market […] accounts [for] over 72 per cent
So the heart seems to be going neglected, it seems, because there’s no way you’re going to not cash in on industrial applications. Especially when you’ve just done a big IPO.
↫ @yassie_j on Akkoma
This exactly illustrates the fears we all have about what an IPO is going to mean for Raspberry Pi. It’s already become increasingly more difficult for enthusiasts to get their hands on the latest Raspberry Pi models, but once the IPO’s done and there’s shareholders breathing down their neck, that will most likely only get worse. If the industrial and embedded market is where you’re making most of your money, where do you think Raspberry Pi devices are going to end up?
Luckily the market’s a lot bigger and more varied now than it was back when Raspberry Pi was new, so we have a wide variety of options to choose from. Still, I’m definitely worried about what Raspberry Pi, as a company, will look like five, ten years from now.
Thom Holwerda,
I agree, users are right to be concerned. Ideally only those who believe in RPI’s community goals would become investors, but this is not how public stock markets work. Stock markets are cut throat environments, those who are unwilling/unable to maximize profits are thrown to the curb. The board serves stock holders and stock holder interests often fail to align with user long term interests. Changes may not happen over night but I am concerned about what it could mean in the long term as investor profits take center stage.
Alfman,
There is more than that.
Public means, it is open to takeover by anyone. Remember the Twitter calamity? Or more recently vmware by Broadcom? Actually it is an excellent target as their CPUs are already made by Broadcom…
When an “offer” comes, and sufficient amount of shareholders want to sell, they have to sell (even maybe triggering a “hostile takeover” over the objections of the board).
For a “foundation” which was supposed to be a non-profit supporting hobbyist this is probably the worst news possible.
sukru,
That might happen down the line but I think it’s a bit early to talk about taking RPI private again like twitter.
I don’t really see that as an exception to the board, the board’s source of power comes from shareholders. Anyone representing over a 50% stake gets to control the entire corporation including the power to replace the board, sell/dissolve the corporation, etc.
This is why I felt it would be ideal for end users to own the project, but this is not how the stock markets work. It takes money to buy representation and for better or worse user/consumer interests aren’t really a priority 🙁
Alfman,
Ideally the market allows democratic ownership of the companies. “I have a share in Microsoft, I get to reap benefits from their growth, and also vote in their yearly elections”
That being said, we ran into a situation of massive amounts of funds governed by few entities.
In theory everything started well. John Bogle looked at the market, and realized all the advisors were worse than a coin throw, and started the “passive investment” movement. His funds, Vanguard became large over time as more people joined together to have a piece of the American prosperity pie.
So far so good…
However that co-op of investors is not worth trillions of dollars. Along with the “managed” counterpart Blackrock, they make up many of the boards of large companies, and made them too “convervative”
Instead of taking risks, investing on long term, they are preferred to make sure bets.
Is this a bad thing? Ideally not. But if all major companies have the same exact strategy it causes a significant systemic risk.
Anyway, I too have my retirement invested in such funds, so there might be no escaping this.
s/is not worth/is now worth/
Wish they’d spin off the Industrial/Embedded as a subsidiary or something. Or a major division or something.
AFAIK we still don’t have any other good SBC that has a good bootable environment with broad distro support. Or do we? I’ve tried Radxa, and they’re pretty…specific and needing to get things direct from them and so on. RPi is just pretty simple with a fairly well supported boot process.
Pine64 is the next best and it’s a huge gap in support compared to RPi. With that said, they are beholden to the interests of Rockchip and Allwinner because those are the chip suppliers they use (though more recently they are getting into RISC-V via StarFive). I’m not saying Broadcom is great; I’m still salty about the whole VMWare thing even with the release of Fusion/Workstation Pro for “free”. However, they were the driving force behind building the RPi community via Eben and Liz Upton, and actually listening to their users early on.
Like any other corporation though, Broadcom now sees nothing but dollar signs in the Pi’s soaring popularity among embedded and industrial customers. This IPO does not bode well for the maker community in any way.
Armbian (which I only discovered very recently) https://www.armbian.com/ does seem to be out to help somewhat, at least. Being basically the raspbian for non-RPi systems. Leaving aside the esoteric bits of eMMC loading on Radxa, the mSD booting was easy.
So the general support that board makers need to do, seems to make it closer to RPi experience, even if not fully there yet, at least with Armbian. And the board support is actually fairly decent, even if mostly it’s general companies maintaining enough bits that they can, rather than an actual business relationship with Armbian for absolute best possible support.
https://www.armbian.com/download/?device_support=Standard%20support&arch=aarch64
Nice find!
https://www.armbian.com/star64/
I had the Star64 board, but never had to chance to try it. This might actually be a good opportunity to turn it on.
Here’s to the death of fun
It is amazing to me that with all the supply chain problems, high prices, and everything else that there are still so few viable competitors to the Pi.
If the ARM world cannot pull it together, maybe the RISC-V side will flourish. Companies like MilkV look like they have a shot.
It’s too bad that such projects start in enthusiast market and end up being bought by a company such as lets say Microsoft. Similar thing happened to GitHub. If we look beyond that, Raspberry Pi devices are now rather expensive, there is some work done in regards to upstream device drivers support and at least that part is good. With successful IPO i assume there could be more products involved. And lets see if they can produce a general purpose ARM PC with wide adoption, Microsoft with Windows won’t ever achieve that.