Revisiting the Raspberry Pi
The “Raspberry Pi” is a $35 computer that has been developed over the last few years to be sold into education, and the developing world. It uses off the shelf components to construct an extremely cheap, versatile platform through which it is hoped a new generation of software developers and hardware engineers will be fosteredin much the same way as the explosion that happened in the mid 1980s when 8 bit computers became affordable.
The Raspberry Pi got me thinking about how we view computers todayhow much we take for granted. We buy a mobile phone or a laptop, switch it on, and expect it to “just work”. We tend not to take an interest in what goes on behind the pretty icons and slick animations.
While this level of abstraction is wonderful from a corporate point of view (support is cheaper, brand lock in is easier, more manufacturing corners can be cut), in the longer term it's a disaster.After a couple of generations, children come through college having no interest in the inner workings of their utility devices. All development becomes “higher level”. The lack of students coming through means development stagnates, and price gouging starts to take place.
It's already happening with mobile phones. Apple and Samsung have done well enough, quickly enough, to atrophy the rest of the mobile phone market. You can't argue that they haven't played their cards perfectly over the last decadebut where does it leave us?It leaves us with a world where a few dominant players build computing platforms for everybody, can stop anybody else from building further platforms, and can control the price of their raw materials to such an extent that thousands of people work in deplorable conditions with little or no public appetite to cause change.
That's why Raspberry Pi is important. It doesn't tip a balance, but it starts oiling the hinge that will be tipped by the next generation.
The Raspberry Pi indirectly reminds us that alternative computing platforms exist in the shape of the many and varied distributions of Gnu Linux, and that the damn fool crusade of Richard Stallman all those years agowhen the software he had collaboratively worked on became the intellectual property of a commercial rights holderis about to pay off.
Raspberry Pi reminds us that when we work together, share, and only profit from the delivery of our knowledge, the world is suddenly a much better place.