Technology

Then it's a good thing that no countries have pure capitalism for their economy.

We need regulation on corporations to keep them in check.

I got a 'LePotato' a few years back when Pi had stock issues, and it worked quite well as a Pi 4 clone.

https://lemux.minnix.dev/c/sbcs

There are so many!

I think Pine64 is pretty cool.

There's tons of similar SBC's out there from Chinese manufacturers, like Orange Pi, Banana Pi, etc; usually using mediatek RISC-V or rockchip ARM processors. They're all poorly supported on the software and documentation side though and take more work to get going, which has always been where Raspberry shined- nobody else has made embedded computing so easily accessible with click and go OS options and continuous kernel maintenance.
Probably the only board closest to software parity is the pine64 boards... but it's still not quite as good.

They think that it's gonna ruin the company

Raspberry pi foundation was launched as a charity, and the end goal was to produce a ton of very cheap computers to help children learn about programming. Since then, it has been soo ubiquitous for embedded stuff that for the last couple of years they have basically become unaffordable for the very audience they were intended for. Now they are seeking an ipo because they are used in everything, except as cheap computers for children.

Going public introduces shareholders that prioritizes return on investment as opposed to making technology and knowledge about technology accessible for many.

It doesn't always end this way but often enough to worry about it...

In Tech, an IPO means the business is market ready to be sold off in pieces, ie stocks. The people who buy the product don't care what it does, they use the product maker as a vehicle to more growth and profit. Typically that means the people who now own the business make poor choices about cost cutting, like off shoring support and removing unuseful documentation while removing people with critical tribal knowledge about processes. Each step the new owner takes will be to make the business more profitable, and in the world of business, the only thing they care about are the numbers and not the environment or people that created those numbers.

Every time a company goes public, they become more and more profitable until the only way to continue on that trajectory is to worsen their own product.

Think they'll still be selling the Pico for $4 or the Zero for $15 after they're reporting to shareholders?

Mostly that IPOs put companies into 'infinite growth mode' which is obviously impossible, so their product just degrades over time. They can't just do 'good enough' anymore.

There are a high proportion of far-left types on here. I could see them wanting something to be government-owned or something. But wanting a company to be privately-owned rather than publicly-owned seems odd to me.

And the "enshittification" comments seem odd too.

"Enshittification" isn't some sort of catch-all term for a company doing worse. Doctorow coined it to refer to a point where a company that had been losing money to grow a customer base ends the rapid-growth phase and starts monetizing that base.

That makes business sense for some companies with low marginal costs and high fixed costs, and especially where there is network effect, like social media companies.

But here, the company is profitable, and not unreasonably so. Like, they don't have a monetization phase that they need to transition to.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/11/raspberry-pi-is-now-a-public-company-as-its-shares-pops-after-ipo-pricing/?guccounter=1

In 2023 alone, Raspberry Pi generated $266 million in revenue and $66 million in gross profit.

Raspberry Pi priced its IPO on the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday morning at £2.80 per share, valuing it at £542 million, or $690 million at today’s exchange rate.

Going publicly traded fucks every company up with nextquarter-itis.

Opening up to institutional investment means opening yourself up to ownership by a culture that demands infinite growth. In recent years this has gotten particularly bad; with the rise in interest rates, stocks can no longer deliver moderate growth and still be considered worthwhile investments. Everything is either a rocketship to the moon, or its a sell. Combine that with a string of US court cases that have interpreted tge law in such a way as to foster the belief that its illegal for companies to put anything ahead of shareholder value, and what you get is a top down imperative to squeeze the maximum profit out of everything. When you see Microsoft mulling over ideas like putting ads in your start menu, or EA talking about in-game advertising, this is why. When you see Spotify raising prices multiple times while crowing about how their content production costs are basically non-existent and changing their contracts so that smaller artists literally don't get paid for their music, this is why.

They did spend the last few years screwing over any customer that wasn't some giant corporation on a product that was originally created as a low cost tool for educational purposes.

Because the more commercial they get, the more they stray from their original purpose as a charity to provide low-cost machines for kids to learn about computer science.

First there was the Dynabook, then OLPC, then Raspberry Pi, and now we've basically got to start over yet again because enshittification is imminent.

As long as Raspberry Pi doesn't start ripping off their customers

Give it 2 weeks (max) after the IPO

Hell no, I'm not supporting the Chinese economy.

Lol, I agree with you, but realistically you probably have only avoided a fraction of Chinese made crap

I don't so much care where it's made. The real selling point, to me, for Pi is that their products are well documented, in English, and solutions for problems are easily googled. There's tons of SBCs out there, some of them even inexpensive, but I can't tell if any are going to last longer than a single production run. Meanwhile, I can still buy a Pi 3 after almost a decade. Or I can take the hat I made for a Pi3, plug it straight into a new Pi Zero, and expect it to work without changes.

IPO is a big step down the path to enshittification, especially when there's no clear, dominant alternative.