In the chicken and egg problem of getting support for ARM software, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was the one that unilaterally plopped a ready-to-go (if very weak), low cost chicken in front of everyone. For that, I think they deserve some credit. Sure they built in top of the work of others - so let's acknowledge everyone involved in the process rather than pretend that one party deserves fame exclusively. It was a community effort :)

> getting support for ARM software

It is my contention that this support was largely already present. That's all.

Pi did great work getting cheap boards out to people, and put a lot of effort into education and community building. They exposed a huge number of people to the possibilities of non-x86 computing that otherwise might not have been. So indeed let's credit them with that, it's all great stuff!

But it's quite revisionist to say they helped get linux or BSD or their tools onto the platform, IMHO.

The wide audience itself is a big motivator to get them working on Arm.

This. The ARM ecosystem didn't get a good prebuilt Docker container story until the Pi4, but it was somewhat doable on the Pi3 if you were willing to recompile 80% of containers from scratch. I can only guess that additional adoption fueled the critical mass of incentives for building for ARM as a rule rather than as an exception.

>it was somewhat doable on the Pi3 if you were willing to recompile 80% of containers from scratch.

If Pi3 was so popular, why didn't it exist as a binary?

The pi3 CPU used an older ARM spec, which had issues with producing good binaries for e. g. Go-based builds (I remember that quite vividly).

Beyond that, I can only hypothesize that Docker on non-x86_64 (or multiarch Docker, in general), was very difficult to kick-start for whatever reason. This may have been compounded by the fact that Docker wasn't as broadly adopted by hobbyists back then, so demand for ARM builds want that great.

https://gist.github.com/tyrell/2963c6b121f79096ee0008f5a47cf... looking at this, it seems that debian added it at least 3 years ago and even in 2016 there was a binary, unless you knew about it and it sucked.

But the systems already worked on Arm, that's the point!

Getting more attention to the platform was definitely a good thing, exposing more people to a different architecture, to having a machine cheap enough to just play with, to all sorts of great stuff.

But Linux and BSD themselves were already mature on arm by that point.

Indeed. Debian had full ARM support for years before the Pi, very mature, and was really the only reason the Pi project could even choose ARM. If not for Debian's work, which the Pi relies upon, they'd have never been able to bootstrap.

Debian project also deserves some credit - so let's credit them. There's enough credit to go around got everyone who helped to bring this about.