3 ms·

This is spot on. I've noticed over the past 5 years a disturbing trend of "entitlement" in our startup and tech ecosystem - to everything from trademarks, to d

This is spot on. I've noticed over the past 5 years a disturbing trend of "entitlement" in our startup and tech ecosystem - to everything from trademarks, to data access, to APIs, and most especially entitlement around building products and services on the back of those people's work. While this case with RPi wasn't one of those nefarious examples, the response of the community to RPi is. The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is literally one of enabling creators, and when they went to mistakenly enforce their trademark, the community literally fell all over themselves to bite the hand that feeds them. If you run a successful tech business, you can reasonability except hundreds of people to try to rip off your content, steal your API, demand access to your APIs, reappropriate your logos and designs, and outright steal and resell your content. The mobile app development market is notoriously subject to this trend. I think it would be wise for those in this community to be aware that companies are daily trying to defend themselves against people that generally don't want to develop their own businesses, but ride on the coat-tails of others. The danger is a race to the bottom of dilution for the company brand and outright fraud for customers. If Raspberry Pi or any other company does something like this, take a moment to maybe understand why they did it, and how something might have gone wrong before vilifying a company that literally contributes TONs of work to the creator community. There are many times when I wonder how participants here actually run or have built a company - this comment isn't to gatekeep, but to point out that it makes no sense for a creator community to act like this.

detaro 6y ago
Loudly disagreeing online is not much in the way of "biting the hand that feeds them" (i.e. the parent mentions calling for people to get fired, but I haven't seen much of that here, and is something I'd strongly disagree with), and to the contrary often seems to be the primary method of getting companies to fix this kind of thing. They'll fix it, it'll blow over and I doubt it'll do the Raspberry Pi Foundation much harm. Calling out bad behavior isn't entitlement.
3np 6y ago
I think it's dishonest to call this "entitlement". From my perspective it's the inverse. Quite a lot of us are, and have been for years, disagreeing with the concepts of trademark, patents, and legally enshrined IP. This is nothing new. If anything the reason you see it increasing might be that over the years there have been more and more "outsiders" (not traditional US businessmen or entrepreneurs) in the startup scene than before. Regardless of what you think of the above, as many others have pointed out, the particular way they played this (inaction for years, and then suddenly "do all of these huge changes within two weeks or we'll sue you out of business") is not easy to interpret charitably on them. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Either way, good on them for recognizing the mistake and making amends. Might not have happened without all the backlash.

detaro 6y ago

Loudly disagreeing online is not much in the way of "biting the hand that feeds them" (i.e. the parent mentions calling for people to get fired, but I haven't seen much of that here, and is something I'd strongly disagree with), and to the contrary often seems to be the primary method of getting companies to fix this kind of thing. They'll fix it, it'll blow over and I doubt it'll do the Raspberry Pi Foundation much harm. Calling out bad behavior isn't entitlement.

3np 6y ago

I think it's dishonest to call this "entitlement". From my perspective it's the inverse. Quite a lot of us are, and have been for years, disagreeing with the concepts of trademark, patents, and legally enshrined IP. This is nothing new. If anything the reason you see it increasing might be that over the years there have been more and more "outsiders" (not traditional US businessmen or entrepreneurs) in the startup scene than before. Regardless of what you think of the above, as many others have pointed out, the particular way they played this (inaction for years, and then suddenly "do all of these huge changes within two weeks or we'll sue you out of business") is not easy to interpret charitably on them. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Either way, good on them for recognizing the mistake and making amends. Might not have happened without all the backlash.