That would be great. Here is the mission statement straight from raspberrypi.org:
> The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK-based charity with the mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies.
Cheaper clones from China would aid that goal, but of course, it flies in the face of a fake non-profit company.
And if you are only interested in preventing counterfeits, just slap the trademarked Raspberry logo on there. No need to inhibit progress with patents.
This has most recently happened in the 3D printing world, with Prusa versus BambuLab. Who actually develops an open source slicer? Who allows 3rd-party firmware? Who contributes to the community? Who abides by open source licenses? Hint: It is not the Chinese company.
But at least that GPL-violating, closed-source printer was cheaper.
The opposite, having no clones makes it easier for a group (like RaspberryPi) to enshittify.
Enshittification is where a group first obtains a large market share with cheap/free services and then pivots to squeeze as much out as possible. Having a competent clone is a strong preventative.
> This has most recently happened in the 3D printing world, with Prusa versus BambuLab. Who actually develops an open source slicer? Who allows 3rd-party firmware? Who contributes to the community? Who abides by open source licenses? Hint: It is not the Chinese company.
Bambu pisses me off too.
Unfortunately your parent is talking about patents, not open source vs closed source, or license violations.
> No, it would be terrible, as technology development is not free.
What about compatibility? Wouldn't it be good for competitors to be able to provide compatible PIO interfaces, so customers can churn from one SBC to another SBC without needing to rewrite their code?
This causes a similar problem: people don't buy from the innovator, who needs more money to carry on innovating. They buy from the clone, who mostly only copies the innovator.
that's not how supply and demand works...
I assume that their mission being "accessibility of computing to all", and the org communicating so much on their mission focus, they would be in favor of cheap clones.