Raspberry Pi plans $500m spring listing

[tunk]

Looks like Raspberry Pi Trading is planning for a listing:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-plans-spring-2022-listing

Wonder what this means for the RPi foundation and the community?

[SiliconWizard]

This is weird.

[thm_w]

"Obviously, the $45m we raised in September takes away some of the urgency around figuring out how we fund the future."

So they lose money on the product? What price do they need to raise it to to actually break even.
People are paying $80-150 for pi 4 4GB on ebay, wonder if that is enough to not have to constantly raise money.

[Bassman59]

So they lose money on the product? What price do they need to raise it to to actually break even.
People are paying $80-150 for pi 4 4GB on ebay, wonder if that is enough to not have to constantly raise money.

Are people actually paying that much?

Are they paying that much because they can't get the things brand new from proper vendors and instead resort to the secondary market?

[thm_w]

Are people actually paying that much?

Are they paying that much because they can't get the things brand new from proper vendors and instead resort to the secondary market?

Yes to both.
Looks like Beaglebone black 4GB goes for $55, so, that would probably be the main competition. But I think they've built so much of a brand awareness that they can charge a premium.

[SiliconWizard]

So they lose money on the product? What price do they need to raise it to to actually break even.
People are paying $80-150 for pi 4 4GB on ebay, wonder if that is enough to not have to constantly raise money.

Are people actually paying that much?

Are they paying that much because they can't get the things brand new from proper vendors and instead resort to the secondary market?

Probably yes. The Pi4/4GB and 8GB are out of stock from many official vendors on a regular basis. Currently, the Pi Hut has them all: https://thepihut.com/
but that can change anytime.

Oh, and on top of that, I'm pretty sure there are many gullible people out there that will buy them on eBay or the like for whatever price, because they either are clueless or haven't even bothered to look elsewhere.

[floobydust]

Unlike 2019, they appear to have lost money in 2020 Financials due to low donations and grants? -£450,103 pg. 17 and cashed in some of the piggybank:
"During the year the company converted £6.5m of its investment portfolio into cash holdings, partly as a hedge against potential future market weakness which did subsequently happen in Q1. Markets did recover to some extent and our portfolio valuation at the end of the year was £10.52m versus an opening position of £16.45m. The growth in value of the portfolio during the year, net of conversions into cash, was £0.57m."

It's been almost 10 years since the start, and let's face it - they've flatlined and maybe fizzled out.  One Broadcom media player SOC, milked for years now it will never have SATA and the Compute Modules are a bit strange. They don't really understand embedded systems yet are making H/W. SparkFun is also going modular with their MicroMod and the Function and Carrier boards.
I've never seen the modular concept for embedded systems hardware, catch on though.

It looks like the intangibles- getting in schools, teaching kids to code, are the real Raspberry Pi Foundation benefit for Britain.
I suspect it might go down just like ARM holdings, UK government asleep at the wheel and some foreign investment company like Softbank will scoop them up and then people realize it's a huge loss for the country. Useless inquiry happens afterwards. SoftBank can't unload it for profit etc. leaving ARM an overvalued zombie now.
FTC alleges the semiconductor deal is anti-competitive, suing to block Nvidia’s deal for Arm Holdings.

[Doctorandus_P]

And what are they planning to do with half a dollar?

[SiliconWizard]

And what are they planning to do with half a dollar?

You're right, this is an engineering forum!

[cdev]

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?

[SiliconWizard]

I think that would be great if they provided a baremetal SDK.
I started writing some baremetal stuff for the RPi4 a year and a half ago or so, got somewhere but then stopped. The documentation is unfortunately hard to get ahold of, but obviously the RPi foundation has it.

Also, a SoC with a tightly-coupled MCU inside (now they have the RP2040) could be a pretty cool addition.

[cdev]

The majority of users, even don't realize that the OS, Linux, and most of the IP in it was already free for them to use, and they attribute it to what they might think is the "company" associated with the name they have heard over and over, Raspberry Pi. (but which is actually something much less important) Companies like Apple have the nullification of perfectly usable hardware down to a science, and even people who should know better get fooled by it.


The people of America are being brainwashed to believe that everything, even life itself, soon, comes from the generous hearts *cough* of CORPORATIONS.

Arrgh..

When in fact they are trying to misappropriate everything and lock it down as their own when they explicitly agreed NOT to do that before they used it. And it saved their asses as this country would be a rusty old edifice without the vibrancy and positivism of FOSS which literally saved this country's economy, and makes up its most highly valued companies, and now the rich are generously trying to steal it and claim its theirs when it isnt.  And. At the very least hide where it comes from and the fact that its free. That they could have a computer as powerful or more powerful just by installing FOSS onto the still quite functional computer that the sleazy corporations rendered dysfunctional with their last "software update" from hell..

I can buy a Raspberry Pi at my local Micro Center, they have lots of them in all flavors.. Don't fall for the hype.

So they lose money on the product? What price do they need to raise it to to actually break even.
People are paying $80-150 for pi 4 4GB on ebay, wonder if that is enough to not have to constantly raise money.

Are people actually paying that much?

Are they paying that much because they can't get the things brand new from proper vendors and instead resort to the secondary market?

As I understand it, my father and his friend Adrienne basically invented guerilla/viral marketing, way back in the 1920s.

[floobydust]

But open-source doesn't make money for the developers, so they will eventually run out of love, quit being so nice and it fizzles out. I think there needs to be some middle ground between vampire corporations feeding off the open-source community, and the dev's work putting food on the table.

RPi has a monopoly on the hardware, gotta buy it from them so they have a steady profit. Arduino was doing that until the clones took over. They are trying to push "Pro" and cloud-based tools to make more money. The RP2040 IC is an exception but it's confused as to whether to run an OS or not. I'm not sure what the revenue model will look like for RPi Foundation.
The IPO will attract investors who know nothing about the Pi Foundation's mission and probably drive them into the ditch in order to make profit profit profit. What is their product exactly?

Look at ARM Holdings, they axed 12-15% of their workforce say 1,000 employees, because the Nvidia sale collapsed. Ouch.

[Monkeh]

But open-source doesn't make money for the developers

Most major open source software is developed and maintained by paid developers working for the companies who utilize the software..