The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi’s not-for-profit side expand by “at least a factor of 2X.” And while it’s “an understandable thing” that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, “while I’m involved in running the thing, I don’t expect people to see any change in how we do things.”
No change in current focus, which happens to be the business sector. :)
That explains a lot if this was their plan. RIP Raspberry Pi.
F
So who is the new raspberry pi?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for “when the IPO market reopens.”
Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment.
Upton also told The Register that Raspberry Pi "does interesting work and makes money, and I don’t think those imperatives are going to change.
Still, news of the potential transformation of Raspberry Pi Ltd from the private arm of the education-minded Raspberry Pi Foundation into a publicly traded company, beholden to profit generation for shareholders, reverberated about the way you’d expect on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere.
The company writes that “profits from the sale of Raspberry Pi computers help fund the Foundation’s educational initiatives.”
The UK government’s Companies House lists the foundation as having 75 percent ownership of shares and voting rights, with the ability to add or remove directors, though that information was last submitted in 2016.
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Eben Upton has always been a pile of dog shit. If his mouth is open, he’s lying.
Back when the first Pi was released, it only had 256mb of memory. He came by our hackerspace to promote the Pi, and swore up and down to us all that no updates were coming down the pipe, that it was safe to buy a Pi from him right then, and we weren’t gonna be missing out on anything.
1 week later, they announced all Pis were going to come with 512mb of ram by default, no price increase.
Fuck him. Fuck his stupid face. Never trust a word this dipshit says.
So he unloaded all the unsellable 256mb stock to a bunch of nerds? That’s just good business sense. Man could be president some day.
Well, I guess I’ve bought my last pi then, was nice while it lasted
while I’m involved
I guess that’s the best one can hope for in top-down corporations. I wish they’d make it a workers’ co-op for their and the community’s long term sake but who am I kidding… 🥲
How long before he is no longer involved? It could be sooner than he thinks, who knows.
Probably a radical opinion but I think all businesses should be worker co-ops. Doubt it would fix everything but it would be a good start
We’re all comrades here. They are positioned better than many to do this given their mission, reputation and so on.
RIP Rpi
I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into this.
I think most people’s aversions to the concept of IPOs stems from the fact that it lies at the end of the not-too-uncommon lifecycle of VC-backed companies:
- Get VC investment
- Subsidize your product using said investment
- Grow like hell on account of handing out things at a too-low price
- Prepare for IPO by worsening the deal for customers to improve financials (also known as enshittification)
- Use IPO money to pay off VCs and leave both them and founders with a large chunk of money
Post-IPO the company has to abide by the regular rules of being a company, meaning that they never really re-capture what it was like when they had a large stack of free money to make all deals sweeter than the competition.
All this to say is that the damage is done once you raise VC capital. Raspberry Pi has raised one fairly small round, so there’s potentially some damage done there, but it’s way less than your average tech startup did throughout the years, so this doesn’t necessarily have to mean that everything will go to hell now.
Thanks for explaining the cycle, my assumption was that bringing in board members is what ruins everything.
No, going overnight from running at a massive loss to “time to make loads of cash” is what ruins everything.
So, when Raspberry Pi is inevitably enshitified if they go through with this, who’s gonna be the next big (rather, small) company to get something Pi equivalent to run an OS like Lakka or Recalbox?
I honestly don’t know since I don’t know of any other companies making these kinds of mini computers.
There are plenty of alternative SBCs out there, many mimicking the RPi form factor as well. Look into Radxa, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Pine64, ODROID, etc. I picked up an Indiedroid Nova board last year that is RPi form factor but has the more powerful RK3588 processor. Drivers are still WIP but it is quite fast. I also run my home server on a Radxa Rock Pi 4, which has an RK3399 processor and is very comparable to the RPi 4. Drivers for it are pretty solid these days and it doesn’t require extra work to set up. Just download an Armbian image and go.
Any non-rockchip ones tho? Beagle has been dead for a bit.
Pretty much all the alternative SBCs are either Rockchip or Allwinner if you want ARM. There are a few RISC-V SBCs now but software support isn’t as solid and many of these lack GPUs. There are also a few x86/64 SBCs based on either older Intel Atom or newer mobile parts too.
Yea in one of my other comments down somewhere here I mentioned riscv as a hopeful future option, maybe with someone like AMD spending some resources to bring another viable solution to market. I know AMD is working on RISCV, they’ve got some low power SOCs already. I’m wondering if they got something in the pipes…
SBCs are a fairly mature space nowadays. Plenty of options.
There are literally dozens of alternative products to the Raspberry Pi, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Do a web search for “single board computer” or even just “raspberry pi alternatives”, and see for yourself.
Fair enough.
They always say there is no change after IPO… But there always is…
Raspberry pis were cool when small form factor PC is were not easy to acquire.
If you want to get into Maker stuff get breadboards or an Arduino or something.
Welp time to move on from Raspberry Pi.
the single board computer market has came far since them.
Probably why they’re cashing out now.
It really has, for most uses there are better boards
