While reading various forum posts about Raspberry Pi supply chain issues, it got me thinking about the wider picture this evening. I guess for the benefit of the wider crowd, I need to fill in a bit of back story first.
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 fostered - in much the same way as the explosion that happened in the mid 1980s when 8 bit computers became affordable.
The idea seems to have workedand then some. For the first couple of days after launch, 700 people a second registered an interest with the production partners of the project. Over the first week, over 2 million people. It caught everybody off guard - including the respected partners who will be manufacturing the hardware. Websites went down worldwide.
Anyway.
The whole “Raspberry Pi” thing got me thinking about how we view computers today - how much we take for granted. We buy a mobile phone or a laptop, switch it on, and expect it to “just work”. We are not supposed to take an interest in what it’s doing behind it’s 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 kids coming through means development atrophies, and price gouging starts to take place.
It’s already happening with mobile phones. Apple did well enough, quickly enough, and grew a big enough patent portfolio to essentially perform a “head shot” on the rest of the mobile phone market. Well done Apple. You can’t argue that they haven’t played their cards perfectly over the last decade - but 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.
It’s happening right now.
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. It reminds us that we don’t have to purchase proprietary hardware at hugely inflated prices, built under awful conditions in third world sweat shops.
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 ago - when the software he had collaboratively worked on became the intellectual property of a commercial rights holder - is about to pay off.
Raspberry Pi reminds us that when we work together, share, and only profit from our skill in providing a service, the world is suddenly a much better place.