1) They make a low cost computer where they've put significant work into making it more open software wise.

Their revenue stream is through the sale of their hardware, why do they need to allow people to make clones?

2) Maybe it's to do with the terms in which they get the camera module?

I don't know but I don't see them selling the camera as interoperable.

Your comment just seems to exemplify the phrase:

"No good deed goes unpunished"

They do something good but freeloaders just turn up and demand more.

Other SBC makers don't have an issue offering full schematics, yet, due to their smaller size, have relatively more to lose from being cloned. Moreover, I hope nobody believes that a lack of full schematics is going to stop people from making clones. Schematics can be reversed with not too much effort. Due to their large audience and brand recognition, rpi actually has less to fear from clones than smaller SBC vendors.

If anything, it seems like they've judged that their large size and brand recognition is something that they can coast on to avoid having to offer what other SBC vendors do.

I'm not complaining about rpi existing, I'm pointing out that what they offer is in certain aspects inferior to the offerings of smaller SBC vendors, which is actually surprising, given that their large size should make them much better resourced to match or exceed the offerings of those vendors. This causes me to question whether these values are actually a priority at all, even if they claim so.

I would buy cheaper RPi clones the same way I do with Arduino clones from China.

It's very unlikely releasing schematics would change anything.

RPi as a board is clearly simple enough that there would be clones if you could get components at competitive prices. The only conclusion is than that you either can't get the CPU, or you can't get it at a competitive price.

RPi use Broadcom chips, which you rarely find these on other hobbyist boards. The most likely cause, after what I heard from people in the industry, is that you usually either can't can't get Broadcom chips at all, at acceptable prices, or even documentation for them when you are only interested in the small quantities you'd need for introducing a new/clone hobbyist board. Not unless you've got some serious connections.

Given the fact that a single Arduino costs about half the price of an RPi...

The only reason I would consider buying an Arduino (or similar) is for super-low-power applications.

Yeah, that's what it's meant for. RasPi is a computer, Arduino is a microcontroller. Different tools for different jobs.

Yeah, but my point is that Arduino has a much higher premium than a Raspberry pi.

Otherwise RPi would have been copied a long time ago at a lower price.

Maybe RPi developers deal with with some investors that way? (in order to attract more money)

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a nonprofit.

That gets 99% of their SoCs and other chips from Broadcom at cost. Don't forget this if you decide to compete -- you can't win on price.

How are you a non-profit if you pay a salary to you employees and allow your suppliers to make a profit?. They act as a 'low profit' company, but they do make profits.

Do you realise that non-profit means that you just don't have leftover cash at the end of the year in your balance sheet? Non-profits pay their employees and their suppliers, their financial situation has absolutely nothing to do with what you are implying.

I think the gp’s point is that to a lot of entities (employees, suppliers) there is little difference between for profit and non profit. And if your nonprofit is passing profit along to a for profit ... you can see how the lines blur. Maybe a way to interpret the above comment is that the incentive structure for many people involved is not significantly impacted by the nonprofit status. And non profits can have money left over at the end of the year, they just don’t distribute it to shareholders.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity registered in England and Wales. "The object of the charity is to further the advancement of education of adults and children, particularly in the field of Computers, Computer Science and related subjects." They have a trading subsidiary.

Anyone sufficiently cynical (not me) can read the accounts of both entities:

- https://beta.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-details?regid=...

- https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/08207441

Interesting, didn't know this, only up to 2017 is published, but that year they report:

> This was another year of exceptional growth with Revenues at £25.5m (2016 - 16.3m) and Operating Profit of £9.7m (2016 - £8.9m)

And that's a binding object - charities' trustees are legally accountable to ensuring the charity acts to fulfill its stated aims.

Hence they aren't dealing with investors, which was his original question.

I'd say that Broadcom is the mayor investor here.

its a charity, and unlike in the US, charities are tightly controlled and have to publish reasonably detailed finances.

I thought being a non-profit meant you had goals that weren't profit; there are non-profits with billion dollar endowments that presumably have leftover cash on their balance sheet...

That's the distinction between not-for-profit and non-profit. They are quite different on both legal and operational standpoints.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization#Nonprof...

Are there any single Widely known, Non-Profits Organisation that fits your description?

What you think a non-profit is, is not actually what a non-profit is.

> How are you a non-profit if you pay a salary to you employees

How does paying your employees suddenly make you for-profit?

Do you know the definition of "profit"?

They've specifically said that the camera module DRM chip is there because they make money from selling the camera modules and they don't want third-party cloners undercutting their pricing and eating into their profits, as happened with the non-DRMed version one of the camera module. Thing is, the third-party camera modules aren't just much cheaper, they're also offered in a whole bunch of useful variants that aren't offered officially. So in order to ensure their continued profits, they're using DRM to actively make their platform less useful.

> So in order to ensure their continued profits, they're using DRM to actively make their platform less useful.

but that is demonstrably not true. The CSI interface and driver is opensource (https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9951525/), anyone can create a camera that piggybacks onto that port. Infact, there are a number of aftermarket cameras that do. Some have built in infrared, some are tiny.

What they are attempting to do is stop counterfeit "official" camera.

Also, all that money goes to either developing more board, or running educational outreach. So I think one can forgive them the urge to protect revenue. It's not like they are microsoft in the 90s, or oracle.

The CSI interface is open source, the image processing hardware to take the data and turn it into actual images is not - it's run by a proprietary undocumented blob on a proprietary undocumented core. So you can interface to whatever camera you like, you just can't use it as a camera. Even that part wasn't open source until well over year after they added the DRM chip.

Every one of those afternarket cameras - the tiny ones, the big ones with replaceable lenses, the IR ones, the funny fisheye ones, all of them - works around this by using the same sensor as the official v1 camera and looking enough like it that the existing code will talk to it. This is precisely what the Raspberry Pi Foundation added the DRM chip to the v2 to stop people from doing. They can't do anything about the v1 clones, but they can stop anyone from doing the same with the better sensor in the v2 and they have.

(In theory the open source CSI driver is useful for non-camera hardware though - for example, there's one obscure third party board that uses this for HDMI capture. I think this may be the main intended purpose. It came too late to save the Kickstarter campaign a few years back promising such a board though.)

> They do something good but freeloaders just turn up and demand more.

I hope you realize that by "they" you mean the hardware vendor and by "freeloaders" you mean the vendor's customers.

Is 1) really valuable? There's plenty of computer hardware you could put a fully open software stack on that's as or more powerful than an RPi and would otherwise just end up in a landfill or whatever. Open hardware would be significantly more interesting.

Plenty of clean food in dumpsters for you to eat too.

Yeah, I know. The people who stock the vending machine at work throw out 'expired' stuff all the time that I swipe. Your point? We absolutely should not be wasting this stuff, it's bad for the environment, and it's bad for our wallets.

There is merit to ecological reasoning, but sometimes people like nice things; and concern over the use of pi’s over existing arbitrary computers is so low on the list of ecological priorities that perhaps it’s better to simply recognize the value it provides to people who want to buy one.

You're right, it is much more important that people feel good about themselves than that the planet continue to be hospitable to life.

The planet is perfectly capable of co-existing with raspberry pi’s. For something as grand as climate change, you won’t make a dent here.

No droplet feels it is responsible for the flood. These things add up.

I'm not saying Raspberry Pis don't have a place, I just think a lot of things people seem to want them for would be better suited by just reusing old hardware, which has the nice side effects of meaning that hardware isn't wasted.

"freeloaders just turn up and demand more."

If this were software, this would be a discussion about open source, would you accuse people of forking an open source project of being freeloaders?

Yes, given the recent discussions how some projects were surprised that many companies are putting non-copyleft licenses to good use of their investors, when they are full compliant with what the license requires from them.

If that's what the license allows that's perfectly fine.

I believe the point was that some people don't think that view point is fine. No one has yet taken ownership of that position apart from possibly the great grandparent

As a previous line manager one said to me “yes, and I want a pony”. That they want to be more open does not mean they are currently fully open – in fact, it requires them to not yet to be fully open. Their primary goal (last I checked) is to be cheap, being fully open is at the very best their secondary goal.

That doesn't follow. Firstly, I don't think I've seen any other SBC vendor fail to publish full schematics. This is a peculiarity of rpi's offering.

Secondly, nobody is forcing them to add DRM chips to anything. That's not something that can be written off on "a contractual obligation made me do it." They did it of their own will.

Counter hypothesis because I can’t be bothered to research it fully:

Pi: “Hello we wish to buy a $thing”

Vendor: “Certainly. We sell $thing for ten dollars per unit if it doesn’t have DRM, or five dollars per unit if it does.”

The camera PCB was made by rpi for specific use with the rpi. The DRM chip is not part of the camera vendor's assembly. It is a separate chip placed on the PCB, therefore placed there by the PCB designer, i.e., by rpi.

Ben Upton said:

> You can plug any CSI camera into the Raspberry Pi. There's even a kernel driver for the CSI receiver, which we paid for ((link: https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9951525/) patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9951525/). What you can't do is clone the official v2 camera module and use the default ISP tuning, which we also paid for.

https://mobile.twitter.com/EbenUpton/status/1088440503622909...

Personally I have no problem at all with protecting the investments around add-ons like this module, if it means they continue to persue them.

I'd prefer if they gave us the full functionality of the device though - the imager is capable of global shutter but it is locked out.

That's a fair point. Perhaps when camera v3 is released they'll have the option of updating start.elf and removing the restrictions on using this hardware.

Isn't the use of the chip by the user entirely optional?

Well, it's optional in the sense that if you can find a way to use the camera with some board other than a Raspberry Pi then you don't have to use it. If you're doing the intended thing of connecting it to a Raspberry Pi, though? Not optional.

> Vendor: “Certainly. We sell $thing for ten dollars per unit if it doesn’t have DRM, or five dollars per unit if it does.”

Hah - sounds like the "boneless vs bone-in steak" sales model - take the bone out of the steak, and suddenly it costs more per pound than it does with the bone left in. Somehow, less costs more - and people sadly pay for it.

If they wanted to be open they'd probably transition to RISC_V.

> This stated intention and rpi.org's actions

Please, never shorten or distort domain names... I went to rpi.org which turned out to be a spam trap.

It's just a standard squatted domain, I don't see any spam trap.

I didn't mean email spam. Yes, domain thing, whatever it's called.

Citing the part with the VideoCore is just fully nonsensical. The Raspberry Pi is the only SBC out there with a fully open-source, production-level graphics driver.

> Secondly, why was rpi.org caught adding DRM chips to their optional camera addon board?

to stop counterfeit boards. There are many _other_ cameras that you can use for the rpi, so its not like they are trying to block out competition. its to stop people making illegal clones and ripping people off. (cough I'm looking at you amazon)

see semi official explanation here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=149426

The people that make the raspberry pi are a not for profit, they use the money made to sponsor children learning to code. Its not like they hide their aims: https://static.raspberrypi.org/files/about/RaspberryPiFounda...

tl;dr:

its to stop people making knockoffs, taking money from a foundation who are trying to educate an entire generation.

Thanks to you and @kingosticks above for digging up these official accounts.

Cursory examination of rpi firmware suggests that this DRM logic is implemented in start.elf, one of the proprietary blobs required to boot an rpi. This is, in itself, significant, since opening this blob would obviously make this restriction easy to circumvent. In other words, rpi have taken design decisions which essentially motivate them not to open up these boot blobs, but rather use them as a chokepoint of control over the platform, see also [1].

From this, we can infer that rpi.org will probably never get rid of these boot blobs (as opposed to simply not having found the time/resources to do something about them).

[1] https://github.com/nucular/raspi-keygen

You are right, they probably won't open the blobs if it means circumventing their own DRM, which I think has been shown to be used reasonably. The mpeg license has almost the same argument as the v2 camera, I think we have covered that.

But that aside, "as a chokepoint of control over the platform"? What platform are you specifically talking about?

The same could be said about the VideoCore 4 blob which was used to boot the SoC. And yet they just did get rid of it.

I don't think they got rid of the blob, so much as moved it from the SD card to an onboard SPI flash more like you'd find on a typical PC. It's still there and even more required to boot the board than on previous Pis, but people distributing images no longer have to worry about the licensing and other headaches that were caused by having to include it.

There's a mainline driver that according to their own statements is now used for the gpu. Whether there's a firmware blob underneath it is a whole other story and as long as it's not something that has to be distributed with the OS I don't see how it should be treated any different than e.g. the AMD or intel gpus.

IIUC, you're saying that, for the Raspberry Pi designers, being open hardware is not only not a requirement, but there's actually requirements to be aggressively closed hardware in some regards?

I don't think one can paint attempting to stop counterfeit cameras (which were aggressively counterfeited) as being aggressively closed hardware.

Look Rpi have a clear goal, to get kids coding. Everything, and I mean _everything_ they do is to further that goal. One part of that is to have a platform that is, safe, easy, expandable and _cheap_. A side effect of that is that its mostly open.

Now, is it as open as say fabbing your own RISC-V SoC? no. But then that would cost a boat load of cash, and it would then be cloned and resold by third parties. Thus, no money for education. (worse still, dangerous counterfeits might be bought by schools, cause injury leading to legal action.)

So, being pragmatic, and noting that the ecosystem is far more valuable to me, and almost everyone else, than the hardware, I will accept this behaviour.

It's fine if that's their requirements, but that wasn't clear originally.

It seems that people who care about technology open standards, open source, and open hardware need a clear understanding of Raspberry Pi requirements, and that they're actually getting hardware that is more closed than a typical PC.

(Related: Starting over a decade ago, some IBM ThinkPad models infamously whitelisted mini-PCIe cards, so that only a small set of particular cards could be used, which was very unusual for PC hardware based on open standards. One of the biggest practical reasons to put Coreboot on those ThinkPads is to get rid of the awful whitelisting, so that people could use whatever cards they wanted, including using WiFi cards supporting later standards and working without having to download closed firmware blobs.)

It was always the requirement. It was designed as a machine to replace the BBC micro.

most PCs have BIOS, which is closed source, and difficult to get access to. yes there are opensource alternatives, but they are not entirely practical.

Most modern PCs have a TPM, EFI and a whole host of other bits that make opensource drivers exceedingly difficult. Then there is the graphics card, where if you want to actually have decent speed it means closed source drivers (I'm talking nVidia/ATI, intel doesn't really count as they are adding GPUs as a value add, not a core business.)

Harddrives have closed source and obfuscated software that actually does the writing/reading.

Then there is the out-of-band management that is shoehorned into a lot of Intel and AMD's kit.

so, to say that it is more closed than a PC, is either ignorance or hyperbole.

Also, you have to remember that yes, the PC was based around open standards, but not open source. You still had to pay to get certified, or even get access to the spec.

Considering that you can attach any hardware either in the form of a HAT, or via the CSI, I think the argument is flawed. Again, there is nothing stopping people using a clone, if they so wish. But all the rpi clones appear to be mediocre at best.

Although PCs have traditionally had closed-source firmware, this firmware has not typically been used to implement malicious functionality (aside from cases such as the Thinkpad example above), making it historically less of a concern (though this is changing). Vendor lockin doesn't magically become acceptable because kids (nor is it ethical to teach kids that DRM is okay/normal).

Also, define rpi clone - rpi did not invent the SBC genre. Many more open products precede it.

FYI, AMD graphics drivers are fully open now.

> not typically been used to implement malicious functionality

so raspberry pi, in an effort to be more open than say Dell/HP, where you had/have to pay to download drivers, bios and other updates, is _more_ malicious than say apple/google who are competing to create a closed garden with a remote lockout, where nothing is owned, only rented?

ya.

I really don't understand this viewpoint.

Look, I've used embedded 386s. I've seen the evolution of ARM SBC first hand. I've used gumstix, sheevas and custom rolled jobbies. You know what united them all? they were bloody expensive and difficult to use. Pis are a joy to use. Plus if you accidentally blow the board, you're not down £500

Adding a DRM so that people can't make knock off cameras, in exchange for a £10 full linux SBC that is _easy_ is a worthy exchange. Even if they weren't a charity. The fact that they are single-handedly dragging the pathetic excuse for IT education in the UK ("here is how to use Microsoft office") into something approaching usefulness is a massive massive bonus.

The ecosystem that raspberry pi supports, the OS, magazines, training, teaching, class room outreach and research can only be done with cold hard cash. That cash comes from Pi sales.

Don't get me started on DRM. Look I know you think that everything should be free, but that means I can't earn a living.

Teaching kids that copy/pasting someone's work, making a halfarsed cheap copy and selling it for loads of profit, with no support is a good moral choice, you might want to re-asses your world view.

Yes open source is good. Yes you should give back and contribute. But, to move forward, money has to be invested, and it has to come from something.

Yes, removing ownership from the people is exceptionally bad. The trend towards the "sharing" economy undermines workers rights to the point that we are entering digital feudalism. But that is another topic.

I don't own a smartphone/any Apple/Google products, or Dell/HP machines for that matter (not surprising to me that they're bad). My frame of reference is typical PCs, which aren't in the habit of applying vendor lockin with regards to what peripherals you can use - and other SBCs.

I don't understand the premise that not applying vendor lockin to a camera module would make SBCs unreasonably expensive. Competing SBCs are more open, many predate the rpi and despite the fact that they probably sell fewer units than the rpi (due to less brand exposure, not cloning), and thus possess lower economies of scale, I've never seen one which costs "£500".

>Don't get me started on DRM. Look I know you think that everything should be free, but that means I can't earn a living.

I think this is clearly untrue from the success of other, more open SBCs.

>Teaching kids that copy/pasting someone's work, making a halfarsed cheap copy and selling it for loads of profit, with no support is a good moral choice, you might want to re-asses your world view.

But I never claimed that kids should be taught that. What I do claim is that kids should not be taught that it's ethical or normal/acceptable to try and use malicious functionality to institute vendor lockin, creating an artificial monopoly in compatible peripherals, because it isn't.

Moreover, it appears this DRM has had a chilling effect on third-party cameras with novel functionality (i.e., not competing for the same applications as the official camera), according to a comment posted above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20261787 So there's real evidence of harm done by this.

>Yes, removing ownership from the people is exceptionally bad. The trend towards the "sharing" economy undermines workers rights to the point that we are entering digital feudalism. But that is another topic.

It isn't another topic. There is a systemic trend of hardware vendors using firmware to advance and prioritise their own interests over those of the device owner, essentially using technological measures to undermine the first sale doctrine. Of course, this isn't illegal, though it ought to be.

   > But I never claimed that kids should be taught that. What I do 
   > claim is that kids should not be taught that it's ethical or
   > normal/acceptable to try and use malicious functionality to 
   > institute vendor lockin, creating an artificial monopoly in
   > compatible peripherals, because it isn't.

I'm sorry, I didn't buy a Raspberry Pi for my little brother in order to teach him about vendor lock-in. I bought him a Pi so that he'd learn Python and explore the boundary between the electronic, software world and the real physical one that so often seems shrouded in mystery. I did not buy the Pi because I like supporting non-open companies- I bought it because A) it has a great value proposition, especially once you factor in the community support, and B) I like the Raspberry Pi people. They have hearts. They care. I understand them DRM'ing a $10 part when it's not crucial to standard operation (nor a lot of projects) and it's not like you can't just get an old PC and stick a webcam on it.

The way I see it, a Raspberry Pi is more than the sum of its parts- while commercial companies care about the chips and the complexity a solution like a Pi can remove, I personally bought a Pi for my brother to learn on.

> I've never seen one which costs "£500".

2006, gumstix with bluetooth was $180, but that was a very small system to dev for. embedded 386 in volumes of 1 were ~£380, CF flash(certified) £80-200. Software was extra, as was the debugging interface, which may or may not be a fancy serial port. Ethernet, RF, all extra. Wifi? naaa.

The arm board, I don't know how much they cost because they were custom made. So hundreds of thousands I suspect.

Then we have the tools that supported it, not exactly kid friendly.

Someone has published the HMAC key for the camera DRM module: https://gist.github.com/marcan/6dde73a9a0c917cd4fc9784a0a73e...

My understanding is that they mean open in software not hardware.

This doesn't add up either, since they seem to be effectively walling themselves into not opening up some of the software needed to boot rpis, which remains proprietary. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20261549

The assumption that they would prefer to handicap their main product because of some unknown deal they have on an accessory seems biased to me. The SoCs that they use are Broadcomm ones, a company known for being hostile to open source. Perhaps the fact that they have now sold over 25 million units of what is essentially their old designs that wheren't selling anymore is opening their eyes on the money that can be made. The developer of the new open source gpu driver is a Broadcomm employee.

The point is that for some unknown to us reason they deemed it a good idea to add DRM on a side-project they have. But that doesn't mean they can't make a new camera at some point.

I agree that if rpi decides not to do camera DRM anymore, this motivation not to get rid of the boot blobs in the main product disappears.

Currently they are defending this practice, however. It logically follows that as long as they institute this policy of using DRM on the main product to prevent use of third party camera modules, the boot blobs will remain...

I think people misunderstand what this DRM is about. The Pi has a special connector for a camera. Anyone can use this connector to build their own camera module and they can use the kernel driver that the RPi foundation paid for. But you also need to develop an App for it. The RPi foundation made their own camera accessory and an accompanying app for it. What the DRM does is that it only allows their own accessory to work with the app. So it's more like brand protection than it's market control. There are plenty of other cameras on the market that you can buy. Why they chose the camera to DRM out of all the peripherals I don't know, but the only reasonable place that they can stick it into is the blob that Broadcomm provided.

Btw the situation with the binary blob has been going for years and from what I've gathered in the past what's happening is that the foundation members signed an agreement to not reverse engineer anything on the SoC when they made the first Pi. Since then they offered a price for an open source gpu driver but didn't follow it up with more competions. So either Broadcomm shut them down or it paid off in internal pressure since Broadcomm paid and provided the mainline driver used in this version.

These SBCs are for development. Failing to publish the schematics makes evaluation harder.

> This stated intention and rpi.org's actions are simply not isomorphic. If they want to make Raspberry Pi more open, firstly, why do they publish only abridged (read: fake) schematics?

Why do people tend to dismiss the openness of the RasperryPi with completely unrelated things? This is the classic case of Whataboutism[0].

Just because you can't replicate the entire product in your garage, it doesn't mean that it isn't quite open already.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I don't agree with the parent but it isn't an example of whataboutism. He's taking issue with the stated aim of openess, with examples he feels aren't open.