Why One Person Thinks Raspberry Pi Is Unsuitable For Education 133
An anonymous reader writes "Raspberry Pi was designed for education. As any popular product is bound to, Raspberry Pi has been criticized a lot for things like lack of a box, absence of supplied charger or even WiFi. Raspberry Pi has a much more fundamental flaw, which directly conflicts with its original goal: it is a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations. It isn't even remotely an open platform."
The author thinks that patents on ARM are a serious threat to the openness of the platform (among other things like the proprietary GPU blob needed to boot). But even the FSF doesn't go that far. Wired had an editorial with the foundation justifying "selling out a little to sell a lot" that has a lot of info on the choices they had to make to hit their cost target.
Another stinky purist shitting on your parade (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh well (Score:5, Insightful)
Design something better if you don't like it. Who is stopping you? Most likely the submitter wrote the article.
One Person Is Pretty Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, you're worried about patents on a microchip? If thats your concern, you're fucked as you won't find one anywhere anytime in the foreseeable future that ISN'T patented.
You'll find one without a patent some time AFTER a fabrication plant opens up that you can afford to use for silly ideas like FOSS chips.
I.E. its not likely to ever happen. Some people have no idea what reality is like at all.
--BitZtream
Ye gads! (Score:5, Insightful)
Remove ARM for patented FPGA? (Score:5, Insightful)
His solution to getting away from ARM patents is to use an FPGA? Uhm, find me an FPGA chip without a patent then.
Dear Slashdot,
STOP ACCEPTING IGNORANT BLOG SLASVERTISMENTS.
Holy logical fallacy, Batman! (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but this argument doesn't hold much water. He's assuming that devices useful for education must be composed of parts that are free of any patents, etc. That simply isn't true, and the devices can teach valuable skills and lessons even if some parts are patented by other corporations. I learned a good deal of basic computing using an Apple ][ and I turned out fine, despite any patents of specific parts of the device I used.
Re:Milkymist in Production? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, the shorter meta critic version:
Who, exactly, has done a better job of creating low-cost computers for education, then?
If your answer is Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, or Apple, I'm not impressed. Even with a case, power supply, keyboard and mouse doubling the cost, the Pi is still less than 1/3 the cost of the nearest competitor.
Also, there is a question of just what kind of education you are attempting to support - Pi envisions a return to hacker culture, it may be missing the mark somewhat since the hackers they revere were spending hundreds to low thousands of dollars on their homebrew kit and a sub $100 investment in some ways implies a reduced commitment, but if you "just want to try something" and need a computer to do it, they've made a very capable little chunk for an amazingly low price.
Re:only alternative... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Holy logical fallacy, Batman! (Score:2, Insightful)
Seconded.
I learned to program on a Commodore-64. Then an Atari 400. Neither of which was open, but nobody claimed that they were unsuitable platforms for learning how to program.
He's nuts (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, his only objection is "the hardware itself is closed"?
This is intended to be sold into schools, not top-end engineering facilities. Nobody's going to design the next ARM killer at the age of 15. They're going to be getting the idea of breaking problems down into their component parts and developing structured solutions to them. For which this is perfect.
Re:Ford cars bad choice for teaching auto tech... (Score:2, Insightful)
To hell with learning to repair them... nobody should be learning to DRIVE in these cars until they're open source!
So what if it's closed? (Score:2, Insightful)
a black box tightly sealed with patents and protected by corporations
So was my Commodore 64. So fucking what?
Get off if / cry harder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Milkymist in Production? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen a number of the alternative devices, and they all have their own little ups and downs. Some have cases and come with power supplies, some do not. Most are more expensive, some options cost about the same. Nearly all of them are, "coming soon" rather than "shipping now".
So, not to detract from the Pi (I do have one, and love it), but it's great to have options, and that does mean addressing shortcomings. I have very little respect for people that get mean and shit on others' hard work while producing nothing of value themselves, though. There's no reason we can't keep things civil.
Similar to the BBC Micro (Score:5, Insightful)
The quoted article is a troll. It is also whining and elitist. Do we want to encourage programming as a skill, or support a cult of purity? Is a lack of low level open source drivers for the Pi going to have any impact on novices? If you want complete open source platforms, they exist. Just not for $35.
Re:One Person Is Pretty Stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, why as a student do I give a shit if the CPU is patented? That's as relevant to education as the school bus's windshield wipers being patented.
Re:Teachable Moment (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not a good philosophy to have for education, science, or any learning in general. Everything must be out in the open if we are to take it seriously and build on it with new research or ideas.
Bullshit. Teaching does not work that way. If you want to explain how a device 'actually' works, you teach theory (because it is something that crosses the boundaries between architectures, and you are able to isolate small nuggets of knowledge into digestable packets). You may use pseudocode for this, or you may use some diagrams, but you do not use the heavily optimised code that these devices use at their core. The aim is to encourage students to learn, not to scare the shit out of them on day one. What is the point of describing a single architecture down to that microscopic level of detail, when it will be out of production before the child has left university? Teaching is about ideas and concepts, it is not about describing the quirky specifics of the graphics drivers of an already 'old' architecture (it's not ARMv7). This is a device to help 10-16 year olds get their first experience of the lower level aspects of a computer. They have the ability to put together their own linux distros (if they wish), and have full access to most of the sourcecode for the OS (If that interests them). Isn't that enough? Isn't that better than what came before? Or would you prefer teachers taught how adders work by pointing an electron microscope at the chip?
Re:Milkymist in Production? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I'm with you on the question of performance, I'd also question the suitability of FPGAs, both as an "open source" platform and as a learning tool for anything below university level courses. FPGAs are about as closed as it gets when it comes to hardware platforms. The verilog/VHDL compilers are, generally, closed source. I know there's an open one or two, but Mentor Graphics, Xilinx, and Altera all ship closed source compilers. The place and route algorithms that are used are all patented and closed source. The architecture of the FPGA itself is patented and closed source.
So, what, exactly, is the point of using an "open" processor on an FPGA? To make everything harder to do?
If you're really looking for a Free/Open processor, then your best bet is to put your money where your mouth is and back opencores.org in producing an ASIC version of the OpenRISC 1000. Even then, it's still built on a proprietary process in a fab, where you can't even get the technology files required to layout the processor without signing an NDA.
Here's the sad truth of it. You're dealing with a proprietary process anywhere from the chip level down. You simply cannot complain about not having open silicon and be taken seriously. Here's how it works:
If you want to make a chip, the first thing you have to do is find a design. Now you can make your own, and open source it, or you can get a pre-made design. If you choose to use an open-source design, then you're good--so far--but you'll have a significant performance lag behind the proprietary options. This goes double for video processing, memory controllers, buses, etc., etc.
Next, you need to find a fab who will make the chips for you. Here's where it gets bad. Even 180nm fabs consider their processes to be trade secrets, so that you have to sign an NDA just to get a process description file from the fab--this means your layout is, perforce, closed source.
Even if you somehow find a fab which will allow you to open the technology file, the placement and routing software for VLSI design is all closed source and patented. This is because place & route is a HARD problem. NP Hard, in fact.
So what it comes down to is this: until the homecmos [google.com] people get their process going, you're stuck with something proprietary at some level. So then how much proprietary stuff is tolerable?
The Raspberry Pi Foundation had the goal of being bringing computing in a low cost package for education. The tradeoffs required to use open designs for the processor are quite steep: e.g. it would be a colossal time investment to get Linux running on a non-standard--read: non-proprietary--SoC. Using some proprietary chips to get there seems reasonable, so long as the OS doesn't become proprietary. The GPU blob is unfortunate, but not unexpected, particularly if you want decent performance.
Re:design something better (Score:4, Insightful)
You are trying to invoke the Brand X fallacy.
No one needs to be specifically trained in Brand X products in order to be able to use them on aome job. Computing skills when taught properly are quite independent of the brand of tool involved.
Guy misses the point entirely; openness irrelevant (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't need to be open hardware.
The whole point on the education side is to have cheap computers that schools can use in bulk for teaching kids, not a lesson on open platforms. Not a lesson on building tiny computers. It's designed to be a small linux box that can run/make applications; nothing more. How many other computers in education now are completely open down to the individual chips, eh? Hasn't crippled their use in education yet!
Re:Teachable Moment (Score:4, Insightful)
Teacher: ... ok and let's now try to see how the video works, pull up the software code.
It is impossible even if the video driver is open source. I spent plenty of time controlling hardware. First, you must have detailed knowledge about specifics of operation of this hardware. It may be hundreds of pages long, with schematic drawings, flow control diagrams, and such. Most of it will be incomprehensible to a novice. It's hard to read even if you are an experienced engineer. Then you must have the code of the driver. Driver is not your garden variety "Hello, World" - it can be written, or just understood, only after the student is already familiar with userspace programming. The trouble is that the driver does not have an identifiable path of execution; it is a collection of subroutines that can be called by different threads, running on different CPU cores, on different IRQLs, and each subroutine does its own special thing. Driver code is cluttered with semaphores, spinlocks, kernel calls (esp. in Windows) and so on. It is very hard to read. Nobody in his right mind would want to teach on that even if both the h/w user's guide and the software sources are available.
There are many good educational projects. In the video department you can build a VGA controller in the FPGA and then you can write a simple application that operates it. Teaching does not mean going into gory details of spinlocks from day zero. But skipping on those on a modern CPU will just cause crashes. Educational assignments have to be carefully constructed so that they teach exactly what is needed, and skip details that are not relevant today. I'm sure when you learned to drive a car it was not done on a NASCAR racetrack in the middle of a race.