It seems to me like if Richard Stallman announced an IPO.
I think this will affect users of the raspberry pi. When it becomes for-profit, we will see prices go up, "open" disappear, decisions become more self-serving.
The prices already went up. The latest version is expensive.
Or is it already?
There are like a zillion Chinese single board computers out there. What's so special about raspberry pi that it's worth a half a billion dollar valuation?
All the Chinese boards release a single OS, Linux packages maintained on some strange .cn domain. Something is wrong with the wifi chip driver but they don't care, they've moved on to the next iteration.
It has been clear for years that Broadcom no longer cares about RPI. Without that subsidy, RPi is dead.
More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39187817
Are they just doomed to fail at that point?
Are they roughly 1/100th of a Microchip? Maybe that's a bad comparison. But $500 million is in-and-around the market cap of u-blox. SiTime is $2.5 Billion right now (5x larger than the $500 million IPO). So I think its a fair comparison to make.
