Raspberry Pi has been changing over the years and the latest upheaval

Raspberry Pi has been changing over the years and the latest upheaval
is the proposed IPO. Now we learn that it is likely to be in London and
as soon as possible.

Raspberry Pi revolutionised low-cost, and hence accessible, computing.
It did it, initially at least, as a non-profit espousing the idea that
children needed low-cost computing devices to gain access to the modern
world.

At first I doubted the whole idea - after all programming is about
software and there was, and still is, lots of redundant hardware around
that could be used. I quickly realized that I was badly in error as the
Pi took off with hobbyists and the embedded computing market - and
indeed with me and my own friends and family.

Initially there was only the Raspberry Pi Foundation which was set up
in 2009 as a non-profit to further computer science in schools. This
was augmented by Raspberry Pi Trading, now called Raspberry Pi Ltd, as
soon as it became clear that the first Pi was a success. The role of
the for-profit company was, and still is, confusing. It was said that
it would be funding the non-profit and that its goal was to develop the
Pi range of hardware.

Right from the start there have been critics that stated that the Pi
was not open source and this is true, but it was initially "open
enough". Various binary blobs were needed to get the machine up and
running, but mostly this didn't make a whole lot of difference, even if
you were trying to do difficult things. Most of the time the
information you needed was available.This is less true at the moment
with the advent of the Pi 5 and yet few seem to be making a fuss, even
though this gives us a good idea of how the future will develop.

tworasppisites

The Pi has been a surprising success in the industrial setting. It
provides a form factor that is between a microcontroller and a desktop
machine. You can use it to control some LEDs or a chemical reactor and
yet still play multimedia and browse the web. It is a desktop computer
cheap enough and small enough to build into a coffee machine.

A great deal of its success in this respect is its operating system.
Back in the early days Rasbpian was an independent port of Debian onto
the Pi. Now, renamed Pi OS, it is the official OS and managed by
Raspberry Pi. It is still open source, it has to be as it's
Linux-derived.

There are lots of hardware alternatives to the Pi range, but what they
lack is coherence. They generally ship with a half-baked modification
of Linux that becomes abandonware soon afterwards. If you are
developing something that you might turn into a commercial product, and
this is the norm even for the most unambitious hobbist, then you don't
want to put your faith in a company that might not be around next week.
The role of Pi OS in the Pi's sucess is much underestimated and its
importance in an IPO is also likely to be down-played. Building a
commercial empire on open source software isn't a good bet.

pi5fan

So now we get to today. During the chip shortage. Raspberry Pi Ltd
showed its true intent and the supply of devices to anyone other than
industrial users dried up. We are now past this point and devices are
reasonably readily available, even if many a Pi enthuisast has moved on
to other things and vowed never to forget the betrayal.

Now is a good time to launch an IPO. And Eben Upton reported yesterday
that they are in talks with London banks about an IPO as soon as the
market conditions are right. This has spooked many a Raspberry
enthusiast to become a former enthusiast.

The fact of the matter is that once shareholders are involved almost
anything is possible. Even CEO Eben Upton's reassurances:

"We've always tried to run a business that does interesting work and
makes money, and I don't think those imperatives are going to change.
We will keep doing the same stuff. Certainly while I'm in charge." (The
Register)

Well all of this could change big time when shareholders need to see
the value of their shares going up and, more to the point, when
increasing profit becomes the only goal. It is difficult not to think
of what has been happening to Boeing since it moved from being
engineering-focused to shareholder-focused.

People have been commenting that we could see a move to a more
proprietary and less open Pi - but this is already happening. The Pi 5
isn't backward compatible with earlier hardware because it uses a
custom RP1 chip and, guess what, there are no plans to sell the RP1.
Without access to the RP1 it is very difficult to see how to produce a
Pi 5 clone - the whole market belongs to Raspberry Pi. Not only is the
RP1 proprietary, information about how it works is also difficult to
come by. A rough draft of an incomplete manual was released recently,
but it simply reveals how much is being kept back.

My best guess is that the Pi 5 is the start of a new Pi range. The CM5,
the industrial version of the Pi, has already been discussed and it
should be available later in the year. It sounds good, but it is going
to present huge problems for any company trying to move custom software
from a CM4 as the RP1 makes them incompatible. Of course, it also makes
the CM5 proprietary.

I think Raspberry enthusiasts and industrial users, who in the main are
also Raspberry enthusiasts, have a lot justifiable worries, but I doubt
any of them will affect the IPO or the eventual price paid. I have a
feeling that the golden days of the Pi as far as the enthusiast and
educator are concerned are numbered - I just hope I'm proved wrong.

pi5rp1
* Harry Fairhead has a hardware background having worked with
microprocessors and electronics in general, for many years. He is
the author of books on the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Pico
in the context of IOT in C and Python/MicroPython: [1]Raspberry Pi
IOT in C, [2]Raspberry Pi IoT in C with Linux Drivers, [3]Raspberry
Pi IOT in Python with GPIO Zero, [4]Raspberry Pi IoT In Python
Using Linux Drivers, [5]Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico/W in C,
[6]Programming the Raspberry Pi Pico/W in MicroPython, and
[7]Master the Raspberry Pi Pico in C: WiFi with lwIP & mbedtls.

More Information

[8]PC Maker Raspberry Pi Picks Banks for IPO, Choosing London Over New
York

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[9]The Pi 5 Breaks The Mold

[10]Raspberry Pi Back In Stock - Well Almost

[11]Raspberry Pi At 10

[12]Raspberry Pi Goes Public And For Profit?

[13]Raspberry Pi Chip Shortages Cause Price Hike

[14]Raspberry Pi Most Popular Industrial IoT Device!

[15]Pi Compute Module 4 - Time to Take Industrial Pi Seriously

[16]Raspberry Pi or Programming - What shall we teach the children?

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