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yeah exactly. now, here's the thing: if you want to plug in newer hypocritical-boards... ... i'm sorry, you may be confused by the use of that phrase - allow

by lkcl 10y ago

yeah exactly. now, here's the thing: if you want to plug in newer hypocritical-boards... ... i'm sorry, you may be confused by the use of that phrase - allow me to explain before completing the sentence. broadcom is a highly unethical company that was caught completely off-guard by the rbpi phenomenon. their MOQ for this processor is 5 million units. the only reason they allowed it is because it was for "education" and it was one of their own employees working on it. now, when you get one of these "education" boards, the first thing that happens is that a proprietary program is uploaded to the GPU, which then and only then turns on the CPU. this should be ringing massive alarm bells already for anybody who knows that respecting the privacy of children is fundamentally important. but if that's not enough, if these children wish to watch films on these "educational" devices, they are forced to pay $2.50 to a cartel in order to obtain - not information but a PROPRIETARY library. so here's the message that broadcom tells kids: "we want you to get educated! you're free to do so... except no further than WE say you can. fuck off kids if you want to educate yourself about the way our cartelled business makes money". total hypocrisy. now, i'm keenly aware that they're under enormous pressure to release the GPU's inner details, but dumping the tools onto the software libre community and expecting them to pick up the pieces doesn't strike me as being particularly responsible either. anyway so back to answering your comment... :) so if you want to plug in 15mm high boards you need a housing that can cope with 15mm high boards. you want a pi-top in other words not this one. if you've seen the pi-top, however, you'll notice that it's almost 1.25 in thick, possibly even more! there are other issues with it as well, such as: the team haven't fulfilled their promises to be open with the schematics or the 3D CAD files. i've taken a heck of a lot of issues into consideration in the design of the 15.6in laptop housing, basically as a demonstration to the industry that there is another way.

tbirdz 10y ago
The pi includes h264 and mpeg4 decoding support. You only have to pay to activate the VC-1 and mpeg2 codecs. But, I don't see why you are blaming broadcom and raspberry pi for this, the cost comes from the MPEG LA's license fee for using their patents related to the video codecs. I guess you are saying broadcom or raspberry pi or someone else should have paid the license fee for the users, instead of having the users pay the cost themselves? They did that for h264, which is probably the most needed codec.
- lkcl 10y ago
  enshrined in patent law is the right for anyone to implement a single instance of a patent, so that they may improve on it. source code that's downloaded and then compiled thus constitutes "a single instance". if the fuckers at broadcom had stopped for one second and thought, "we really should release the full source and just let people get on with it, because after all this is about education", then there wouldn't BE any need for them to collect royalties. instead they went "we make money from this, therefore we should continue to exploit school children". broadcom DOES NOT have to distribute binary versions of their CODECs. they COULD have chosen instead to release full source code under libre licenses. the fact that they are distributing binaries tells you everything you need to know.

by lkcl 10y ago

tbirdz 10y ago

The pi includes h264 and mpeg4 decoding support. You only have to pay to activate the VC-1 and mpeg2 codecs. But, I don't see why you are blaming broadcom and raspberry pi for this, the cost comes from the MPEG LA's license fee for using their patents related to the video codecs. I guess you are saying broadcom or raspberry pi or someone else should have paid the license fee for the users, instead of having the users pay the cost themselves? They did that for h264, which is probably the most needed codec.

lkcl 10y ago
enshrined in patent law is the right for anyone to implement a single instance of a patent, so that they may improve on it. source code that's downloaded and then compiled thus constitutes "a single instance". if the fuckers at broadcom had stopped for one second and thought, "we really should release the full source and just let people get on with it, because after all this is about education", then there wouldn't BE any need for them to collect royalties. instead they went "we make money from this, therefore we should continue to exploit school children". broadcom DOES NOT have to distribute binary versions of their CODECs. they COULD have chosen instead to release full source code under libre licenses. the fact that they are distributing binaries tells you everything you need to know.