Can we please stop promoting the Raspberry Pi stuff as "open".
The Raspberry Pi is NOT OPEN. If you wish to build your own Raspberry Pi, you can't do it. Broadcom won't sell you the chips. You can't even get the documentation.
There are other options that work just as well both less powerful and cheaper (Espressif and similar) or equally as powerful and same price (Beaglebone and similar). And these are genuinely open.
I really don't get all the Raspberry Pi love among open source folks.
There's 2 separate but somewhat related communities here - open source and open hardware. Most open source people don't care that much about hardware. They just want a cheap and tiny Linux box, maybe with some GPIO pins.
And really, you can take it further - is espressif really better? You can buy the chip, but it's not like they give you the actual transistor-level design so you can modify it and redistribute it as you so choose.
> Most open source people don't care that much about hardware.
That may be, but, in this case, Mozilla needs to care and should know better. Especially when there are perfectly fine alternative options.
Broadcom can torpedo this if it starts impinging on their own business in some way. That's not the kind of power you want to hand to somebody when you are trying to promulgate something.
> Broadcom can torpedo this if it starts impinging on their own business in some way. That's not the kind of power you want to hand to somebody when you are trying to promulgate something.
Not really - if broadcom torpedos it, tomorrow the raspi guys buy Mediatek or Allwinner chips instead or we switch to a different board maker. They don't go bust on the spot and almost everything software wise would remain the same even on a different board. Plenty of similar boards are already using these other chips, there's lots of competition in the ARM SoC space.
This appears to be billed as a stand alone thing but it uses a standard Raspberry Pi and Z-Wave / Zigbe USB sticks. What is potentially novel here is being able to get up and running just by using their SD card vs doing the work to install drivers and a UI typically needed to get the protocols working.
I've been running my own Linux based hub just fine without this but it does seem like a good entry level device for cheap.
The Raspberry Pi is NOT OPEN. If you wish to build your own Raspberry Pi, you can't do it. Broadcom won't sell you the chips. You can't even get the documentation.
There are other options that work just as well both less powerful and cheaper (Espressif and similar) or equally as powerful and same price (Beaglebone and similar). And these are genuinely open.
I really don't get all the Raspberry Pi love among open source folks.