The notion of Open Source Hardware is extremely slippery and while it can be argued on a moral plane, it doesn't work too well in practice.
Where do you stop when going down the layers of the stack? The article mentions OpenRISC but neglects the fact that the FPGA's that can run its HDL use proprietary, vendor-specific toolchains.
What about the peripherals? I don't know of any open source DRAM chips that could be used for the electronic designs. It's not a viable business model and never will be in such a competitive market I imagine.
In the end, the biggest value boards like the Raspberry Pi provide is accessibility. Every kid can have a computer of his own without worrying about getting scolded by mom for corrupting the disk. They give children a sense of control over these amazing machines which consequently allow them to dream up weird and crazy things they can do. Their real education lies here.
What else do you really care about? It's not the last and final RPi that will ever release! Things will only get better.
The complaint about lack of documentation is valid. Of course programming to the hardware is desirable; that's why you'd buy the thing, to do device control.
Where do you stop when going down the layers of the stack? The article mentions OpenRISC but neglects the fact that the FPGA's that can run its HDL use proprietary, vendor-specific toolchains.
What about the peripherals? I don't know of any open source DRAM chips that could be used for the electronic designs. It's not a viable business model and never will be in such a competitive market I imagine.
In the end, the biggest value boards like the Raspberry Pi provide is accessibility. Every kid can have a computer of his own without worrying about getting scolded by mom for corrupting the disk. They give children a sense of control over these amazing machines which consequently allow them to dream up weird and crazy things they can do. Their real education lies here.
What else do you really care about? It's not the last and final RPi that will ever release! Things will only get better.