Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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The Pi is also notoriously Broadcom-proprietary[1], whereas an x86 PC has been a de-facto standard for decades; everything is well-known or has been reverse-engineered already, especially with a 486-era system.

It's somewhat similar to the reason people (like me) restore and drive old cars, also despite the "noise and power consumption" (and some happen to like the former ;-) --- they're relatively simple and well-understood.

Likewise, there is also a very active retrocomputing community, although a lot of it goes back much older than 486 or even PC --- the C64, ZX, and the like continue to have plenty of new software written for them.

[1] and if you ask for a datasheet or any more details about it on their "excellent community" (to quote some), you basically get told politely to f'off: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=163420

Hmm. This https://s-matyukevich.github.io/raspberry-pi-os/ made it seem like it's about as open as an x86 PC. The only thing I see that's proprietary is the very initial bootloader that apparently runs on the GPU. But then x86 motherboards come with proprietary BIOSes as well.

We are talking about hardware specifications.

Broadcom is horrible with datasheets. If you're not apple or intel, an f off should be expected in any request for a datasheet from them.

At work, we briefly considered deploying a fleet of raspberry pis as cheep ARM servers. We ordered an initial batch for evaluation, but then quickly realized just how little technical information Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi Foundation are willing to make available to their users. They were tight-lipped even with the bare minimums. We ended up abandoning the idea soon after.

Unless these companies manage to break away from their bad habits, I can't see ARM servers gaining any sort of market share outside of big companies.

Are you able to expand a bit on what info you were looking for? I had been considering using the Compute Module for a more "commercial" application of the Pi, and we use them periodically almost like an IoT event hub at work, so kind of curious what your roadblocks were for adoption. I probably won't have any solutions, just curious what you were dealing with.

I've heard good things about the sopine clusterboard[1] + modules[2].

1. https://www.pine64.org/clusterboard/

2. https://www.pine64.org/sopine/

The analogy between retrocomputing and classic car enthusiasts really captures the spirit of what’s going on well.

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