I'm confused. Weren't they sort of started as an educational/charity/open sort of organization?
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.
I mean they already plan to have a Sony-made closed black box "AI" chip that sends telemetry to Sony, and they unapologetically work with ex-surveillance people, they're already there imo.
That article seems beyond awful, consistently misspelling raspberry, claiming the 4 is the latest model, and the sentence "According to Sony, it protects privacy by simply transferring metadata to the cloud and conducting all data analysis entirely on-chip" is quite contradictory.
> the sentence "According to Sony, it protects privacy by simply transferring metadata to the cloud and conducting all data analysis entirely on-chip" is quite contradictory.
How is that contradictory at all? The chip will indeed be more private than doing AI work in the cloud like most people do, because the actual data work stays on the chip, and only metadata is sent to the cloud. Obviously a really privacy conscious person won't be okay with sending only metadata to the cloud either, but the claim makes perfect sense from the perspective of a big company. It's not clearly written in the original article I provided, but the Engadget article backs up the core claim and phrases it more clearly, so here:
"Sony says it preserves privacy by analyzing data strictly on-chip and only sending metadata to the cloud."
> Build a privacy conscious system by utilizing edge side analysis of data and images and sending only the metadata output to the cloud.
I probably should've led with better sources for sure, but it was late when I responded and I was tired. I did my research on this thoroughly last year when all this came out originally and I was just trying to pull up something without thinking about it too hard. After all the facts of the case are literally an internet search away for those not too lazy.
I'd assume they do have the visions. Getting $$$ is definitely not a crime, and the whole business builds on getting $$$. What I'm worried about is something similar to Unity.
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?
Well, I suppose some of that suggests optimism about selling boards to commercial customers (in spite of all the assurances about still having enough to sell to hobbyists). And commercial customers, just like hobbyists, want SBCs that have decent hw and working, maintained sw. Which is sadly not the case for pretty much any of the competitors, not reliably.
Because they actually provide updates and support to the platform.
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.
This. There are a billion SBCs on the market and most of them are irrelevant because you're stuck with some janky image from an out-of-date kernel that probably even the original company can't recreate from source. Hobbyists who enjoy tinkering with them for a few months after they buy them might not mind, but it's not gonna work for the big buyers and it's not great for educational purposes either.
Well, the fact that both Microchip and Nordic Semiconductor are shipping actual chips based on RISC-V says that if it's not this year, the year is really close.
Yes, there have been an assortment of dodgy "RISC-V" chips from dodgy Chinese suppliers that would appear and disappear like spectral invaders from another dimension.
Until last year, though, I couldn't plan around being able to buy and put a RISC-V chip in a product. Now I can.
$500 million is pretty small IMO. They're probably fairly evaluated there.
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.
Something to be said for using mass-produced, very cheap, locally produced electronics in military stuff. Even moreso when the electronics engineers you hire stand a good chance of owning a few at home.
My experience is that government / military contracts are difficult to deal with / get if you're not established and those synergies like "engineer has some at home" are non existent.
Was more thinking that if an engineer has some at home, they're probably already gonna know how it works versus some arcane chipset and driver set that they need to learn from scratch.
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.