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Raspberry Pi Hits the 2 Million Mark

Posted by timothy on from the chicken-in-every-pot dept.

The Raspberry Pi project that we've been fans of for quite a while now has hit a new milestone: Today, they announced that as of the last week in October, the project has sold more than two million boards. Raspberry Pi is anything but alone in the tiny, hackable computer world (all kinds of other options, from Arduino to the x86-based Minnowboard, are out there, and all have their selling points), but the low price, open-source emphasis, and focus on education have all helped the Pi catch on. If yours is one of these 2 million, what are you using it for? (And if you favor some other small system for your own experiments, what factors matter?)

1 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. We Value Freedom & Liberty Here by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    For some reason the RPi always seem to get so much bitterness here. Apparently there are a lot of self-described nerds on a tech website for nerds who cannot imagine the use of a very small, cheap, low power hackable computer with moderate computing power.

    I find this very strange.

    You're new here, right?

    We value Free here, as in freedom -- as in LIBERTY. The Raspberry Pi is not in any sense free. It is closed and proprietary. It has a craptastic Broadcom system on chip (SoC) which Broadcom refuses to properly document.

    The Raspberry Pi is not really an open architecture.

    Read this (and weep):
    http://RaspberryPi.StackExchange.com/questions/7122/level-of-hackability-of-raspberry-pi

    There are a lot more sources that confirm this (sad) info. Just search for "raspberry pi bootloader".

    Broadcom has a *very bad* reputation in the open source world, and they have *EARNED* it.

    If you want to play in their walled garden, limited by what they will allow you to do, it is a cool toy. If you want to do whatever you want, you will be very disappointed.

    Isn't the true value of a *general purpose* computer being able to do anything you can conceive?

    The fact that there are significant reverse-engineering efforts going on
    https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/wiki
    https://github.com/hermanhermitage/videocoreiv/
    is proof that the platform is anything but open.

    You don't have to reverse engineer something that is open.

    Vendor lock-in is very bad. That's what you get with the main chip on the Raspberry Pi.