I understand this as it being profitable to make and sell accessories, but not to engineer the accessories. The engineering is done in the hope of being able to sell the accessory. If they can't sell the accessory, the engineering investment is purely loss.

But on the other side if you have a proprietary interface then there will be less accessories and the product will be less attractive for customers.

So, not a charity...

Charity doesn't mean "has to waste money".

You do realize that most charities sell some things, right?

They don't have to be profit oriented, though. They just have to balance the money flow.

And what is protecting your investment to ensure it is not a massive loss, if not balance their money flow?

Anyway, engineering things to manufacture them and sell for profit is not a charity. It's indistinguishable from normal business.

Also Raspberry Pi SBCs and accessories are made by Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd, not by the foundation. If you look up FCC testing reports, it's all submitted by Rpi Trading. That's not charity even legally.

https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/09/21/raspberry-pi-trading-lt...

Charity, right? You wouldn't know from their own website, because they seem to not publicize their business structure very much. My guess that it's similar to mozilla foundation/co split. Foundation does nothing about the products, it's just a public face. And corportaion does all the product work, and is very for profit.

Anyone can make a camera, there are no restrictions. What is difficult are the algorithms for processing the data that comes off the sensor. The RPI foundation developed a complete solution (camera+software) and they don't want to see copycat cameras make use of their investment in image processing software.

I find this to be completely fair game.

Why can't the hardware provide access to the raw sensor data and let freedom-respecting software deal with it?

It does. https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-media/patch/0d4dc...

You can think of the VideoCore ISP firmware task as a proprietary application and the Pi Camera as a hardware security dongle for that proprietary application.

You can choose not to run that application and access raw data from CSI if you'd like, but if you want to run the special ISP firmware application, you need the hardware dongle.

I think I feel the same way about the DRMed blob as I do about the Pi in general: I understand why the Pi folks did things the way they did, I don't think it's unethical by any stretch, but the situation is disappointing and I would prefer the alternative.

It does. Most people get enraged about RPI cameras unnecessarily. If you don't want to buy cameras from the RPI foundation and want to use/design/connect your own, nobody is stopping you. If you want raw sensor data off the RPI cameras, nobody is stopping you either. It's only when you want to use their image processing with a clone camera that you run into problems.

I just can't get worked up about this, I think this is completely fair.

This is the same argument for closed-source GPU drivers. "Oh, my special secret sauce algorithms!"

Nah. If you want the cred from being open source, be open source.

Yeah, this is a dick move for sure. I had no idea the camera was locked down like this. Just plug in a better quality USB camera and you've bypassed the whole protection. Pointless.