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