But what the fuck do I do with it? No one's out there writing software for your obscure embedded-systems evaluation board. There's no pre-packaged SD images out there to let me play with different OSes. There's no ecosystem of cool plug-in hardware to play with and do fun things with.

The cool thing about the RPi is not just the card itself or how cheap it is, it's all the stuff around it.

Some guy ranting about how it's not as cool and open as this random board GPX5-3520-V2-a from Hardware Maker In China I've Never Heard Of that I'll have to hand port and code every piece of software for, is the same blind category error that Slashdotter types have been making for years about Linux.

Your magic "open" box doesn't mean shit if there's nothing I can do with it.

Some guy talking about porting fedora support to it, so no, you wouldn't have to do any of this.

I probably blew a hundred hours of weekends and weeknights to get 50 minutes of run time out of my machine and something like five people benefited from it.

When Apple came out with a 13" laptop that was less than a pound heavier (with the real battery, not that shitty fake one that was 90 minutes of run time) and happened to run a video game I was interested in, I said screw this and jumped ship.

And suddenly I understood those guys who had been showing up to tech meetups for a year or two with MacBooks. I can spend all my time futzing with my machine like a classic car aficionado, or I can get out and enjoy doing things with it. Once I realized that I had never actually wanted to learn Linux, I just wanted to use it to learn other things, I couldn't go back.

I still occasionally maintain Linux boxes, and sometimes bash, find or sed is the answer to a problem, but with the exception of Docker you literally have to pay me to use it.

He's not a clueless, random noobie. ;)

I think It's safe to call if "for decades" now. 1.85 decades is close enough to count.

I take issue with this.

They certainly managed to capture people's interest but they were not the first and they absolutely still have black boxes on their devices. And no, there were many previous devices available through normal online retail channels.

The 'Plug Computing' phenomenon from a few years previously, while not on the same scale, did some of this.

And did you even read the article linked? At no point does the author say their entire work is lipstick on a pig, just that some of the way the Pi 3 works may class that way.

Open(ish) embedded computing existed before the Pi, they did good work taking it more mainstream, but please don't credit them with everything.

It certainly wasn't the first hackable SBC, but I think adding "mass-market" into the claim makes it defensible. There's a parallel to the Arduino, in my mind. It wasn't the first microcontroller dev board, but it was the one that made that microcontrollers look cool to outsiders.

It seems like version 2 or version 3 they could have gotten something a little less goofy. They have the clout to be able to make some good deals with any supplier. So you can sorta see why that people are frustrated b/c so much community effort is being spent on something that's sorta.. goofy. I wish there was the same community drive behind the ODROID boards for instance

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=73

If they're so concerned about protecting their mission, I don't see why they encourage use of Kodi (well I do understand it, it sells boards, but Android support could be a good selling point too).

Edit: by blindly clicking around I found a post from a Foundation member that said they were locking the forum. Dated mid-March 2015, so i guess the css wouldn't matter anyway

As I said, I have proof via a PM from a forum mod that the CSS on that subforum was intentionally broken (it'd be easy to fix). The aim was to discourage any discussion of Android on the Raspberry Pi, as they saw it as going against the aims of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (the suggestion being that if students had access to Android they'd mostly use it with Android). There were three parts to blocking those discussions. First was to lock the Android subforum. Second was to mess up the CSS on that subforum so it was harder to use as an archive. Third was to lock/remove threads across all forums (including General Discussion) that were about Android on RPi.

If you don't believe me, try posting a thread on the Raspberry Pi General Discussion subforum about some recent Android on the Raspberry Pi progress:

http://www.ubuntufree.com/watch-android-6-0-marshmallow-and-...

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=63&sid=4a...

If it is really about education, get small inexpensive devices in the hands of millions, children... does things should be welcomed. Hell some of them attack a guy that wants to experiment with a different open source OS, that seems extremely conflicting with an open platform from my POV.

For me it is the opposite of being "open", seems more a marketing ploy to me.

You literally just repeated what I said in my comment.

Everywhere he said "the Raspberry Pi 3" he's referring to the product as a whole, which is the culmination of all the work the Raspberry Pi Foundation has done to date, ergo the entire article is about their entire work. If he has a problem with only a small part of it then he would have said "the Raspberry Pi 3's bootloader blob" instead.

I notice this type of negative comment about inexpensive, "hackable" hardware freqently on HN. As if the fact that a piece of hardware is inexpensive and "hackable" is insignificant. Perhaps to these commenters, it is. But to others it may be signifcant.

A pocket-sized computer with networking that boots _either_ a GNU/Linux project, a BSD project or Plan 9, not to mention a few other open source OS, from an SD card. For me, this is the major advance and appeal of the RPi.

Far from perfect but still a major advance from the previous status quo, IMHO. Thank you RPi.

In a sense RPi is a market maker. Now they have to find ways to compete in the market they made.

Every time I feel like somebody has peed into the pool of all the perfect outcomes.

Yes, what the RPi foundation did was great, but it was not magnificent and everyone has the bloody right to voice their opinion about it.

Edit: also RPi actually destroyed some very specific and interesting ecosystems.