Ive never gotten a Pi from "Raspberry Pi Trading" Ive used other suppliers. I'm aware that they have a retail presence, but around where I live they dont have a presence in that incarnation.
If they did, what would it be like? Although the Apple platform leverages a great deal of FOSS, most notably FreeBSD and the FreeBSD kernel, I dont se them advertising that their platform is rock solid stable because of BSD, do you? (Although it would be a good point if they made it)
I dont see Google advertsing that they were built on top of and because of a number of previous innovations without which its founders would not have been able to introduce their groundbreaking search engine. I remember when they were just a single machine running on one of its authors desktop workstations at stanford, and them discussing it at a certain lecture series I used to attend. . (Yahoo started this way too)
I know next to nothing about Facebooks founding because it was on the East Coast and at a school I knew little about. Amazon I know a bit about. FOSS also made it possible.
So, how is the supply of Pis structured, and is RPI becoming just another commercial single board computer vendor? One of many. If so,
That changes a lot.
I'm not at all saying that computer companies making profits are bad, Far from it.
its just I that I thought of RPI as nonprofit up until now. Despite much of their hardware lacking anything like complete documentation. Granted, they have been very successful, and its impossible to ascertain if that was because they were seen as noncommercial or not. Slick!
I think the Compute Modules are an interesting new development, in a number of ways But still, its not rocket science, and lacks the docs as open hardware would demand. Is it just another example, or the Microsoft strategy, the attempt to take by deceitand trickery and the naive public's ignorance what isnt theirs?
Generally, I think I would prefer it if they were nonprofit. Like the OS they are built on top of, Debian.
Maybe I was wrong to think they weren't and that that would remain that way. Given the UK along with the US is what we are.
(Very much "for profit" in *everything*, including education and many other areas many think of as nonprofit. Its been that way since January 1995.)
Does anybody know any more about the backstory of the situation?