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Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

You should always be wary if any binary blobs are required (often the case with video drivers). They will limit what you can do in terms of upgrading the kernel and hence the rest of the OS.

Sadly VIA have a history of not quite getting this whole "open" thing: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=via_o...

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You're entirely right, but Wondermedia/VIA actually have a moderately good history with their GPL source for ARM system-on-a-chips.

Although most end vendors of devices using the WM8xxx line of chips are GPL violators (direct-from-China business models where noone cares), Wondermedia themselves have been supplying GPL source via Harald Welte of Gpl-Violations (formerly also employed by VIA):

http://ftp.gpl-devices.org/pub/vendors/Wondermedia/

100% blob-free to my knowledge. Unfortunately they haven't released anything for the WM87xx series (apc.io) yet, but these devices are brand new so here's hoping.

If you're interested you can dig up some more details, and the follow from-scratch open kernel development efforts, at

http://groups.google.com/group/vt8500-wm8505-linux-kernel/

(What I -really- hope they release is publicly available datasheets.)

My vision for these boards is not to display graphics, but to send/receive data from the internet and a local network. I'm not going to use a Pi to watch movies or some other resource-intensive task. I'd just as soon use the power of GPU that comes with Pi for some other task besides video.

What would be interesting is if one of these boards would be designed such that, by pure coincidence, it could fit into an Apple form factor (cheap/old/maybe used). I've read that in, e.g., Vietnam, people with soldering irons do all sorts of hackish things to iPhones.

Or maybe a market for curved edge form factor casings develops. Maybe it already exists. But I never saw any Apple-like form factors in the mini-ITX offerings. Whenever you see something with a cool form factor, it seems it's always a proprietary package, hermetically sealed, not easy to tinker with.

The Raspberry Pi starts up by loading an opaque blob into the GPU, and that then runs the CPU under supervision. ie the CPU is a servant and controlled by the GPU, not the other way around as is normal in the PC world.

So irrespective of your video intentions, you are still at the mercy of a blob.

But unless your are a real FOSS zealot (say > 500milli Stallmans) you are at the mercy of the bios, the disk controller firmware and the CPU microcode on any machine

In reality being able to run whatever user programs you want in whatever combination you want without artificial is what FOSS is all about.

The "user programs" you want to run are determined by the operating system. And the operating system is determined by blobs, controllers, BIOS and similar gunk.

If for example the Pi blob is such that Linux kernel 3.7 can't run then you are SOL. Or if on a device like this their blob only works with Android 2.3 then you can't run a different version. Or maybe you can't run one of the BSDs.

The video/GPU is especially relevant in the Pi case because it controls what the CPU can do.

Yes that's true - I was thinking of people who complain they don't have details for some deep detail of the GPU shader cores to write an opensource driver for their NVidia card.

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