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> It might grate on some hobbyists who see this secretive approach as the antithesis of open-source but Google Broadcom's stock price and one can see it's be

> It might grate on some hobbyists who see this secretive approach as the antithesis of open-source but Google Broadcom's stock price and one can see it's been a fabulously successful company. I am really interested to see what the people on HN will make of this statement.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago
I think the two factors being compared - open vs. proprietary, poor vs. wealthy - are orthogonal to each other. Does the author imply that open-source advocates believe that secrecy is bad for profits and that open-source is a way to get rich? I've not personally heard that. I do recall arguments that opening your source code will not lead to financial ruin, but that still leaves open the possibility that they're uncorrelated or only weakly correlated.
- salawat 5y ago
  Broadcom, as I understand, is as secretive as they are as a defense against patent trolling. When you have NPE's gobbling up garbage patents to sue everyone and their brother with, locking up the IP tightly is one adaptation to defend against that sort of thing. Still pisses me off to the ends of the earth.
Buttsite 5y ago
He sounds like a total moron because the next paragraph talks about how that secrecy lead to this chip being used for cable sets instead of computers until the Raspberry Pi. But pushing back the state of the art must be worth it for the stock price!
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  I think the main reason nobody else picked up these chips was because they're not really made for general purpose computing. Rather, many of the Pi engineers come from Broadcom, so it was probably more familiarity, price, and partnership that were the main drivers for it getting popular on the Pi.
megous 5y ago
I certainly don't understand why so many jumped on a bandwagon of a SBC which was basically an obscure GPU with some accidentally attached ARM cores, on an I/O starved SoC design, that still doesn't have a useful opensource bootloader even after 8 years or so,... when much more interesting, more open, and chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis.
- geerlingguy 5y ago
  IMO, it comes down to the support and ecosystem. Even though it would be nice to have something more open than Broadcom's chips, the corporate/foundation backing of the project, and the broad adoption after those first few revisions (coupled with the fact that Pis are still some of the cheapest options around) means that someone can come into the ecosystem blind and not have to spend hours or days just figuring out how to get an OS running on the darn thing. And then the fact that you can still run a supported modern OS on an almost 10 year old board... that doesn't seem to happen with other SBCs (most are basically shelved after a couple years), and you end up running ancient OSes on them or obscure community-driven OSes that break in a hundred different ways.
  - megous 5y ago
    There are a lot of boards that have mainline u-boot/Linux support, don't need neither any wonky 4MiB binary firmware which does who knows what, nor any vendor specific tools to control basic things like HDMI, or CPU frequency, and just work for years with any arm based distro. Personally I think it's just a better marketing.
    - floatboth 5y ago
      You don't need vendor specific tools. Especially not on the pi 4 but even before that. The RPi foundation stayed on a 32 bit distro with the proprietary graphics stack forever due to some silly fear of breaking.. something (?) or whatever but mainline linux has been able to manage everything about graphics and display with the vc4 drm/kms driver for ages. CPU frequency has of course been controlled by a mainline kernel driver for ages – heck that's supported in all of the BSD OSes as well.
moffkalast 5y ago
> Company keeping market leading advances secret brings in loads of money. More at 11. I'm sure exactly nobody is surprised. Open source is the antithesis of profitability, as such not being open source equals vast amounts of money, on average.

LeifCarrotson 5y ago

I think the two factors being compared - open vs. proprietary, poor vs. wealthy - are orthogonal to each other. Does the author imply that open-source advocates believe that secrecy is bad for profits and that open-source is a way to get rich? I've not personally heard that. I do recall arguments that opening your source code will not lead to financial ruin, but that still leaves open the possibility that they're uncorrelated or only weakly correlated.

salawat 5y ago
Broadcom, as I understand, is as secretive as they are as a defense against patent trolling. When you have NPE's gobbling up garbage patents to sue everyone and their brother with, locking up the IP tightly is one adaptation to defend against that sort of thing. Still pisses me off to the ends of the earth.

Buttsite 5y ago

He sounds like a total moron because the next paragraph talks about how that secrecy lead to this chip being used for cable sets instead of computers until the Raspberry Pi. But pushing back the state of the art must be worth it for the stock price!

geerlingguy 5y ago
I think the main reason nobody else picked up these chips was because they're not really made for general purpose computing. Rather, many of the Pi engineers come from Broadcom, so it was probably more familiarity, price, and partnership that were the main drivers for it getting popular on the Pi.

megous 5y ago

I certainly don't understand why so many jumped on a bandwagon of a SBC which was basically an obscure GPU with some accidentally attached ARM cores, on an I/O starved SoC design, that still doesn't have a useful opensource bootloader even after 8 years or so,... when much more interesting, more open, and chepaer alternatives started appearing rather quickly after the first Rpis.

geerlingguy 5y ago
IMO, it comes down to the support and ecosystem. Even though it would be nice to have something more open than Broadcom's chips, the corporate/foundation backing of the project, and the broad adoption after those first few revisions (coupled with the fact that Pis are still some of the cheapest options around) means that someone can come into the ecosystem blind and not have to spend hours or days just figuring out how to get an OS running on the darn thing. And then the fact that you can still run a supported modern OS on an almost 10 year old board... that doesn't seem to happen with other SBCs (most are basically shelved after a couple years), and you end up running ancient OSes on them or obscure community-driven OSes that break in a hundred different ways.
- megous 5y ago
  There are a lot of boards that have mainline u-boot/Linux support, don't need neither any wonky 4MiB binary firmware which does who knows what, nor any vendor specific tools to control basic things like HDMI, or CPU frequency, and just work for years with any arm based distro. Personally I think it's just a better marketing.
  - floatboth 5y ago
    You don't need vendor specific tools. Especially not on the pi 4 but even before that. The RPi foundation stayed on a 32 bit distro with the proprietary graphics stack forever due to some silly fear of breaking.. something (?) or whatever but mainline linux has been able to manage everything about graphics and display with the vc4 drm/kms driver for ages. CPU frequency has of course been controlled by a mainline kernel driver for ages – heck that's supported in all of the BSD OSes as well.

moffkalast 5y ago

> Company keeping market leading advances secret brings in loads of money. More at 11. I'm sure exactly nobody is surprised. Open source is the antithesis of profitability, as such not being open source equals vast amounts of money, on average.