3 Jul
2012
3 Jul
'12
11:33 a.m.
The thing to remember is that it is not finished yet.
This is not the
final product.
When I looked (after it was hyped i nthe press, and after I had to
navigate past various Rpi pages to get the bits I wanted from Farnell), I
didn't see anything to suggest that this was not the final product.
Neither in the press nor on the sites I (briefly) looked at.
The motto of Open Source is "release early, release often". They
shoved the hardware out the door as soon as they could. The OS(es)
is(are) not finished, there is no case, there is no ecosystem or
infrastructure around it.
I can think of 3 things wrong with that :
1) It's not open. You yourself said that. Given a piece of oepn-sourve
softwre, it is possible (if you are sufficiently technical) to figure out
a lot from the source. Given a piece of closed-source software, running
on a machine which at the time had no released scheamtics (they are
released now, but as you say, things change), you have an alomst
impossible job figuring it out without docuemtnation
2) It's not software
3) And therefore it's not free. A peice of software can be easily copied,
and thus it cna be made esentially free. A piece of hardware cannot.
DOn;t get me wrong, a piece of hardware is a physical thing and it;s
obvious you have to pay for it. But even thought the Rpi is cheap, it's
still expensive enough that I (for one) would bot buy one unless I knew
it coule be useful. Buying things you haev no use for is simply wasting
money.
AS a result, releasing in a 'beta' version and not stating it was not
finished seems like a rather bad idea.
-tony