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The Biggest Maker of Raspberry Pis Has Been Acquired For $871 Million (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes from a report via The Verge: The biggest manufacturer of the Raspberry Pi minicomputer, Premier Farnell, has been acquired by Swiss industrial component supplier Daetwyler Holding AG for roughly $871 million. According to Bloomberg, the deal will reportedly help both companies compete better in the components market. "By combining forces, we significantly increase our competitiveness and extend our product range," Daetwyler Chairman Ulrich said in a statement, "facilitating a one-stop shopping experience for our wide range of customers from a multitude of industries." Premier Farnell is one of the only companies with a license to design and distribute Raspberry Pis. The Wall Street Journal says the Raspberry Pi devices are a big part of the company's business, as the division in charge of the Pi raked in 16 percent of the company's total revenue last year.
"By combining forces, we significantly increase our competitiveness and extend our product range," Daetwyler Chairman Ulrich said in a statement, "facilitating a one-stop shopping experience for our wide range of customers from a multitude of industries."
Marketing speak for we've just cornered the market.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Raspberry PI's are one of many neat little ARM devices. They are not the fastest but they are one of the trusted. You can also put ARM FreeBSD on them which I think is fantastic.
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/arm/armv6/ISO-IMAGES/10.3
There are also armv7 and a new armv8 project around.
"Premier Farnell is one of the only companies with a license to design and distribute Raspberry Pis."
Licensed? I thought the Pi was "open hardware" so anyone could make them. Maybe a license fee for the video render or something, but that shouldn't be restricted.
Rasberry Piss? My piss is usually lemon, not raspberry.
Anyone can make and sell a board based on the rPi design (probably*). You can sell a crappy one made from recycled reject components, with half as much RAM and a slower CPU if you want to. What you can't do is call the crappy version a "Raspberry Pi" and label it with the raspberry logo. You can call it Blueberry Cake if you want to.
To sell a your board as a Raspberry Pi, you need permission, which is granted only to producers who meet the standards.
You're also allowed to use the trademark name "Raspberry Pi" to say your accessory is compatible with the Raspberry Pi board, and certain other defined uses. Otherwise, you need permission to use the name.
* A quick search didn't find an explicit license for the schematic or other copyrightable design documents.
That, upon reading "minicomputer", thinks about things shaped (and sized) more or less like a PDP11, and never anything smaller than a microcomputer?
Maybe the Raspberry-like form-factor should be called a "picocomputer"?
"The division in charge of" does not mean the thing they are in charge of is the only thing they are in charge of or that the thing even contributed a noteworthy part to the division's contribution to the company bottomline. But that's what you're trying to make it sound like, don't you. Take your hype and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.
Those in the electronics industry, esp EU, Australia, know Farnell (also Newark and Element 14) as a tier 1 supplier to engineers of electrical and electronic parts.
Their catalogue is thicker than your fist, and RPI's make up a couple of pages.
Thus the big story is not about RPIs, but that one of the largest electronic component suppliers has been acquired by a Swiss company.
We would place an order every other day with these guys, but the competition is fierce from Digikey, who would now be the worlds No1 general component supplier, with Mouser and Farnell running second.
46137
I'd go along with that. I take it there isn't a name for the small device form factor yet? Pico form factor sounds perfect because it has Pi in the name. Wrap it, ship it, good idea.
I have a Jameco catalog that is just the right size for most of my needs as a PC modder. Where does Jameco fit into all of that?
I wanted to buy some connectors from them. "NO MINIMUM ORDER" it said, on or near the front of the catalog. ...goes to the item page...
"MINIMUM ORDER 10"
or something like that.
End of attempting to order. I went to eBay and bought exactly what I wanted, in the quantity I wanted.
Daetwyler Holding AG has the biggest piece of the Pi now.
You're not the only one. Personally I have enough junk lying around to forego adding a couple fridge sized boxes for nostalgia's sake, but yes, "minicomputer" does mean that to me.
On a tangential note, I'd been thinking of running VMS in a VAX emulator on top of a couple raspberries pi*, then cluster them, but don't actually have any lying around to do it with. And there's the thing about the shoddy USB and stability.
* Editors take note.
Who writes this drivel? ....
1 either you are the only one, or you are one of many, you cant be one of the only
2 Farnell is a leading electronic component distributor, rivalling Element14 and Mouser, not some two bit Pee manufacturer.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Copyright does not protect facts. Which components are used is a set of facts. To the extent that the schematic is protected under copyright, you can't sell the schematic. That doesn't carry over to building a board based on the design.
Consider that the book "Networking for Dummies" is copyright protected, so I can't make and sell copies of the book. I CAN read the book and use that knowledge to make money. Similarly, I can read the rPi schematic and use that knowledge to make money. The gerber files and silkscreen would be borderline - to be safe one would make their own gerber.
Obviously you run into some gray areas, but in general you should be able to legally clone the design - it isn't patented so far as I'm aware. The question would be exactly which files you'd need to re-write yourself. Since the SOC they use isn't available, you'd probably have to rewrite the gerber files anyway to adapt it for a slightly different SOC.