5 ms·

> The whole goal of the Pi project is to make computers affordable to enable learning and prototyping Is it still though? They have been pushing into various i

by avian 5y ago

> The whole goal of the Pi project is to make computers affordable to enable learning and prototyping Is it still though? They have been pushing into various industrial and commercial markets. There was talk about Raspberry Pi Trading planning an IPO this year [1]. There are companies now that are basing their entire product lines around Raspberry Pi's Compute Modules. This then drives demand for other Raspberry Pi products as well. When you're deeply invested into that ecosystem you also need Pis 3s and 4s for builds, testing, development, etc. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392649

samwillis 5y ago
An IPO of Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd would unlock a lot of funds for the Raspberry Pi Foundation which could be reinvested into further educational activities. It’s probably a good move for the original mission of the foundation.
- peterangular 5y ago
  > An IPO of Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd would unlock a lot of funds It would also make every decision that the company makes from here going forward one of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. For a project rooted in affordable open-source hardware/software that's a major conflict of interest. I get that "Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd" is not the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but it is wholly owned by the foundation as a subsidiary. IMO, it'd be of major concern if any RPI business entities went public.
  - skybrian 5y ago
    As long as the company can make a reasonable argument that it's in the long term interest of shareholders, they can do all sorts of things. It just has to be a reasonable business expense.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      Except it might not be in shareholders' best interests to sell at the current prices, especially in the middle of a chip shortage. The presence of a scalping secondary market is at least partial evidence that the market will support higher prices. Either way, your "as long as..." conditional statement may be logically consistent, but the condition is by no means guaranteed to be met.
      - skybrian 5y ago
        Has there ever been a shareholder lawsuit because a company set its prices too low? I don’t believe this is a thing.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        Who said lawsuit? It doesn't have to be a lawsuit. Shareholders can put pressure on the company in a few ways. And in any case, I'm talking about shareholders' interests, not the (sometimes ineffective) steps they can take to remedy conflicts with corporate leadership. Nonetheless, a lawsuit is possible as well. Foregoing profits in favor of ideology could conceivably be a breach of fiduciary responsibility, a primary cause of shareholder lawsuits. You may be right that there has never been a lawsuit like this about too-low prices, but I simply don't know. And unless you're a corporate lawyer with extensive shareholder lawsuit experience-- or happen to have some legal experience and a subscription to something like Westlaw-- then you are making an unfounded guess. I have a friend w/ Westlaw access, among other databases, but I'm not willing to ask them to spend a few hours researching the issue to see if there's every been such a case, or try to find one myself. But in the history of corporate lawsuits it certainly wouldn't surprise me. There is a body of caselaw that could encompass it, predatory pricing (https://www.justice.gov/atr/predatory-pricing-strategic-theory-and-legal-policy https://www.justice.gov/atr/predatory-pricing-strategic-theo...). Selling significantly below the market-clearing rate demonstrated by scalper prices might provide some ammunition for this claim, but IANAL so I won't speculate further on its actual applicability. If you have more direct expertise or knowledge of the caselaw there I'm happy to hear it. I think, absent completely recalcitrant corporate leadership on the issue, shareholders would force the issue outside of the courtroom.
- deadbunny 5y ago
  Isn't this how we end up with another Mozilla? No way to support the nonprofit and the company keeps doing stupid shit.
2xpress 5y ago
Indeed, RP 4 with 8 GB is a very powerful versatile product, needed for all kinds of industrial and commercial uses, where it would in turn build more value for the rest of society, generating wealth. Attempting to restrict this product to only some specific privileged group will not only be futile, but harmful to the whole society, including that privileged group, as the wealth that could be generated will not be. The current big problem is that 2 years of Coronavirus pandemic and the active Russian beligerance have created unprecedented economic disruption, effectively ending the prosperous times following WWII. We are no longer living in the same world, and expecting things to be cheap and plentiful is no longer a practical frame of mind. The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way. It is too bad that there is really no viable alternative to RP. The current competitors do not provide good ongoing support and are only compatible with specific versions of the Linux kernel, or modified versions of the Linux kernel. I suppose eventually a credible competitor will rise up maintaining good support, without any fair price manipulation BS, and with less weird hardware quirks, and everybody will just switch over to that platform.
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Attempting to restrict it to just education would be a problem, it's much better to make it the cheap universal standard linux thingy anyone can learn on, and then apply that knowledge in real life. But scalping is a totally separate issue. They provide fairly minimal value if any, to anyone but themselves, while raising prices for everyone. I don't really see why a non profit organization should have to support a use case that is detrimental to many people.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way. The "free market" is a bad idea in scarcity times, as the only ones able to pay the profiteering prices will be the rich and wasteful, and ordinary society is left behind. Just look at the PC market where shitcoin miners have completely ruined the supply chain - it's still almost impossible to get decent GPUs at a decent price point after years, and there have been serious though temporary impacts on deliverability of RAM and HDDs with other shitcoins. Or with rental markets where entire city quarters are either taken over by AirBnB-style operations (because ultra-short-term "hotel" rental yields sometimes up to 4x a month what regular renting would allow) or left idle as "speculative" assets (e.g. Londongrad). To make it worse, when scalpers buy up the remains of the available inventory, that inventory gets locked away from being used productively by anyone as scalpers have an incentive to keep their inventory off the market to drive up the price even more! In times of resource scarcity - no matter if food or anything else that's critical for society - a good government steps in and limits the free market (e.g. by banning cryptocurrencies or scalpers, by introducing quotas or by introducing vacancy taxes) so that at least some movement of goods happens.

by avian 5y ago

samwillis 5y ago

An IPO of Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd would unlock a lot of funds for the Raspberry Pi Foundation which could be reinvested into further educational activities. It’s probably a good move for the original mission of the foundation.

peterangular 5y ago
> An IPO of Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd would unlock a lot of funds It would also make every decision that the company makes from here going forward one of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. For a project rooted in affordable open-source hardware/software that's a major conflict of interest. I get that "Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd" is not the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but it is wholly owned by the foundation as a subsidiary. IMO, it'd be of major concern if any RPI business entities went public.
- skybrian 5y ago
  As long as the company can make a reasonable argument that it's in the long term interest of shareholders, they can do all sorts of things. It just has to be a reasonable business expense.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    Except it might not be in shareholders' best interests to sell at the current prices, especially in the middle of a chip shortage. The presence of a scalping secondary market is at least partial evidence that the market will support higher prices. Either way, your "as long as..." conditional statement may be logically consistent, but the condition is by no means guaranteed to be met.
    - skybrian 5y ago
      Has there ever been a shareholder lawsuit because a company set its prices too low? I don’t believe this is a thing.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        Who said lawsuit? It doesn't have to be a lawsuit. Shareholders can put pressure on the company in a few ways. And in any case, I'm talking about shareholders' interests, not the (sometimes ineffective) steps they can take to remedy conflicts with corporate leadership. Nonetheless, a lawsuit is possible as well. Foregoing profits in favor of ideology could conceivably be a breach of fiduciary responsibility, a primary cause of shareholder lawsuits. You may be right that there has never been a lawsuit like this about too-low prices, but I simply don't know. And unless you're a corporate lawyer with extensive shareholder lawsuit experience-- or happen to have some legal experience and a subscription to something like Westlaw-- then you are making an unfounded guess. I have a friend w/ Westlaw access, among other databases, but I'm not willing to ask them to spend a few hours researching the issue to see if there's every been such a case, or try to find one myself. But in the history of corporate lawsuits it certainly wouldn't surprise me. There is a body of caselaw that could encompass it, predatory pricing (https://www.justice.gov/atr/predatory-pricing-strategic-theory-and-legal-policy https://www.justice.gov/atr/predatory-pricing-strategic-theo...). Selling significantly below the market-clearing rate demonstrated by scalper prices might provide some ammunition for this claim, but IANAL so I won't speculate further on its actual applicability. If you have more direct expertise or knowledge of the caselaw there I'm happy to hear it. I think, absent completely recalcitrant corporate leadership on the issue, shareholders would force the issue outside of the courtroom.
deadbunny 5y ago
Isn't this how we end up with another Mozilla? No way to support the nonprofit and the company keeps doing stupid shit.

2xpress 5y ago

Indeed, RP 4 with 8 GB is a very powerful versatile product, needed for all kinds of industrial and commercial uses, where it would in turn build more value for the rest of society, generating wealth. Attempting to restrict this product to only some specific privileged group will not only be futile, but harmful to the whole society, including that privileged group, as the wealth that could be generated will not be. The current big problem is that 2 years of Coronavirus pandemic and the active Russian beligerance have created unprecedented economic disruption, effectively ending the prosperous times following WWII. We are no longer living in the same world, and expecting things to be cheap and plentiful is no longer a practical frame of mind. The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way. It is too bad that there is really no viable alternative to RP. The current competitors do not provide good ongoing support and are only compatible with specific versions of the Linux kernel, or modified versions of the Linux kernel. I suppose eventually a credible competitor will rise up maintaining good support, without any fair price manipulation BS, and with less weird hardware quirks, and everybody will just switch over to that platform.

eternityforest 5y ago
Attempting to restrict it to just education would be a problem, it's much better to make it the cheap universal standard linux thingy anyone can learn on, and then apply that knowledge in real life. But scalping is a totally separate issue. They provide fairly minimal value if any, to anyone but themselves, while raising prices for everyone. I don't really see why a non profit organization should have to support a use case that is detrimental to many people.
mschuster91 5y ago
> The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way. The "free market" is a bad idea in scarcity times, as the only ones able to pay the profiteering prices will be the rich and wasteful, and ordinary society is left behind. Just look at the PC market where shitcoin miners have completely ruined the supply chain - it's still almost impossible to get decent GPUs at a decent price point after years, and there have been serious though temporary impacts on deliverability of RAM and HDDs with other shitcoins. Or with rental markets where entire city quarters are either taken over by AirBnB-style operations (because ultra-short-term "hotel" rental yields sometimes up to 4x a month what regular renting would allow) or left idle as "speculative" assets (e.g. Londongrad). To make it worse, when scalpers buy up the remains of the available inventory, that inventory gets locked away from being used productively by anyone as scalpers have an incentive to keep their inventory off the market to drive up the price even more! In times of resource scarcity - no matter if food or anything else that's critical for society - a good government steps in and limits the free market (e.g. by banning cryptocurrencies or scalpers, by introducing quotas or by introducing vacancy taxes) so that at least some movement of goods happens.