Why One Person Thinks Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable For Education

[wraggster]

Raspberry Pi was designed for education. As any popular product is bound to, Raspberry Pi has been criticized a lot for things like lack of a box, absence of supplied charger or even WiFi. Raspberry Pi has a much more fundamental flaw, which directly conflicts with its original goal: it is a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations (http://whitequark.org/blog/2012/09/25/why-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-for-education/). It isn't even remotely an open platform."The author thinks that patents on ARM are a serious threat to the openness of the platform (among other things like the proprietary GPU blob needed to boot). But even the FSF doesn't go that far (http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Hardware/Endorsement_criteria). Wired had an editorial with the foundation justifying "selling out a little to sell a lot (http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/09/raspberry-pi-insider-exclusive-sellout-to-sell-out)" that has a lot of info on the choices they had to make to hit their cost target.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/09/25/2056240/why-one-person-thinks-raspberry-pi-is-unsuitable-for-education