There's 2 separate but somewhat related communities here - open source and open hardware. Most open source people don't care that much about hardware. They just want a cheap and tiny Linux box, maybe with some GPIO pins.

And really, you can take it further - is espressif really better? You can buy the chip, but it's not like they give you the actual transistor-level design so you can modify it and redistribute it as you so choose.

> Most open source people don't care that much about hardware.

That may be, but, in this case, Mozilla needs to care and should know better. Especially when there are perfectly fine alternative options.

Broadcom can torpedo this if it starts impinging on their own business in some way. That's not the kind of power you want to hand to somebody when you are trying to promulgate something.

> Broadcom can torpedo this if it starts impinging on their own business in some way. That's not the kind of power you want to hand to somebody when you are trying to promulgate something.

Not really - if broadcom torpedos it, tomorrow the raspi guys buy Mediatek or Allwinner chips instead or we switch to a different board maker. They don't go bust on the spot and almost everything software wise would remain the same even on a different board. Plenty of similar boards are already using these other chips, there's lots of competition in the ARM SoC space.

I think they only picked Broadcom because the founder used to work for them and knew how the chips worked.

It is cheaper and more affordable than Beaglebone (£60 vs £25-30)

It's really not:

Digikey US: Raspberry Pi 3: $40 Beaglebone Green: $44

Farnell UK: Raspberry Pi 3: £33.96 Beaglebone Black: £39.74

And the Beaglebone kits all come with a USB cable and don't need a microSD card (both purchased separately for the RPi).

It does seem to be that there are availability issues in the UK with the newer Beaglebone Green, Black Wireless and Blue.

Amazon has inflated prices then :G