Re: [Trisquel-users] Does the raspberry pi and its accessories meet free software/hardware standards?

[duncan]

The Raspberry Pi Foundation have little interest in supporting free software  
beyond being able to create a custom OS with ease. Their commitment to 'open  
source' seems to be a PR exercise. I discovered this when I decided I wanted  
to have a different GNU/Linux distribution to the crippled 'Rasbian'  
distribution, because at that time it was poorly optimised. The Rasbian  
distribution also includes several non-free programs such as Wolfram Math and  
a port of Minecraft. Therefore, the Raspberry Pi really does not teach people  
about freedom, just convenience. Reading the forums, they clearly just don't  
care about projects such as Das U-Boot, and most 'mainstream' distributions  
don't support the Raspberry Pi because it uses an uncommon CPU architecture  
and requires the bootloader blob to initialise the entire system. 3D  
acceleration is also nearly impossible with free software, although I heard  
that work is being completed for support in upstream Linux 4.5 (which itself  
has issues). The Raspberry Pi therefore is nowhere near being free hardware,  
and there is little commitment to free software.