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.
The prices already went up. The latest version is expensive.
Or is it already?
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?
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.
It has been clear for years that Broadcom no longer cares about RPI. Without that subsidy, RPi is dead.
More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39187817
Are they just doomed to fail at that point?
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.
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.
This article also mentions transferring metadata to the cloud.
Also, the Sony press release they reference as a source (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/raspberry-pi-receiv...) has 0 mentions of cloud.
It was at the time I believe, since that's a detail Engadget also mentions. In fact here, since you don't like that article: https://www.engadget.com/sony-investment-will-put-ai-chips-i...
> 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."
> Also, the Sony press release they reference as a source (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/raspberry-pi-receiv...) has 0 mentions of cloud.
Yes but the [literal official website](https://aitrios-promo.wpp.developer.sony.com/en/services/edg...) for the product Sony is pushing says it:
> 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.