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.”
All I know is that basically every IPO I’ve seen has eventually made the product worse. I have no data to back this up, just feelings, but still. As soon as a company starts worrying about shareholders, corners start getting cut or prices start going up for no reason.
Those are the best two examples that come to my mind. Both were great until they IPO’d.
The problem, as I see it, with IPO’s is that the company becomes beholden to shareholders who care nothing for the product, and only for the profit. Quality and profit are fairly mutually exclusive these days.
Reddit hasn’t gone public just yet
Sometimes you have to pre-suck to show investors you are serious about dismantling your company so they can feed on the corpse.
build something, IPO and cash out, then wall st. vultures suck all the value out of it
Google IPO’d back in 2004. Do you really consider that to be the pivotal point in Google’s history?
Reddit hasn’t even IPO’d yet.
Going IPO does not immediately turn a company evil. That’s something that happens over time, because of being beholden to so many shareholders who only care about profit.
Reddit hasn’t even IPO’d yet.
Reddit has been making many user-detrimental changes in preparation for their IPO.
When they are private they still have shareholders, the shares are just not available to the public. When it goes public is when some of those private shareholders want to cash out. So they drive the fundamentals however and sell the stock over the next years.
Yep. Inevitably, when this happens, stock price manipulation becomes the core business.
“I don’t expect to see any change in how we do things.”
Oh, this is going to age like fucking milk. You belong to the shareholders now, mate. They’ll MAKE you change how you do things, and you’ll love it.
What do we want?
_More profit! _ When do we want it?
Now!
I was already planning on never buying another Pi based on how they fucked over consumers in favor of business customers during the shortages. This only reinforces it. Companies going public irreversibly eradicates any and all consumer value in favor of shareholders and I do not support any company that actively chooses that path. Fuck 'em. I’ll just buy random chinese SBC’s instead…
Exactly where I’m at, hearing this news. Chasing growth in profit at the expense of everything is a sure way to ruin a good product. I’m already not a fan of the Pi 5 being so expensive. I thought the goal was extremely cheap, low performance computing. The idea of a functional desktop computer for $30 was kind of seismic. I guess we still have the zero.
For the record I’m not for the IPO.
Working in hardware, this is a shit take. If you’re saying a hobbiest should be prioritized over keeping a paycheck coming to employees at a firm that rely on rpi parts being delivered, umm…
WITH priority as a giant customer (not with rpi, but multi billion accounts) we still were facing 72+ week lead times for components. A smaller company, more likely to use an rpi as an integral part of their widget, would be facing MUCH longer. That means manufacturing halt, and going under.
Should they have taken on industrial costumers in the first place? That’s another question. But to say my octopi server has priority over someone being able to feed their family is bullshit. Not only that but industry customers keep volumes high, allowing for lower end prices.
It’s not even about the paycheck though- because we are assuming that all units shipped are being sold at the same MSRP. It wouldn’t matter who they sold to, they were gonna get paid the same regardless of buyer if they were selling more than they could produce.
A simple way to handle the shortage would just be to ship first to order, first to ship. But no, Pi outright said they would not ship to consumers, only corporate customers, until the shortage ended. That is what burned up my goodwill, because it proves they don’t actually care about any open source community farther than their wallet can be thrown. The IPO only reinforces that greed motive, and I will not be buying their products.
Again, I’m against the IPO. Never brings good.
I don’t disagree with your points re:fairness and the community goodwill.
I think they still are the only game in town for my usecases. The support and “just works” factor is unmatched.
And with the Hock Tan era Broadcom, you’re not going to see another bcm based design upstart.
Hopefully RISC-V can ramp up and provide a viable alternative in the near term, with an AMD or something willing to provide some resources.
No change in current focus, which happens to be the business sector. :)
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.
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.
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.
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… 🥲
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.
How long before he is no longer involved? It could be sooner than he thinks, who knows.
So who is the new raspberry pi?
RIP Raspberry Pi
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.
That explains a lot if this was their plan. RIP Raspberry Pi.
F
RIP RPI
Time to stock up on pi 5’s
There are alternatives that don’t involve giving them your $$
Genuine question: what alternative would you recommend? I was planning on buying a few for various projects next month with my next paycheck but now I’m not too keen on funding them.
Two that I can think of are the BananaPi and OrangePi. Google “raspberry pi alternatives” and I’m sure you’ll find much more.
My local Pinkberry uses orange pi as their POS computer.
Any alternatives that aren’t Chinese?
Or get any of the hundreds of other SBCs on the market.
No point adding to their sales figures to make the IPO more successful.
How can the not-for-profit side of business expand with an IPO? People invest specifically to increase their wealth. How’s this going to happen with a non-profit business?
Surely those shareholders just fucking love Raspberry Pi so damn much that they just have over their cash no questions asked.
You’re forgetting that superannuation, 401k, retirement funds that everyone pays for goes into stocks too.
Technically speaking you could be a shareholder.
In an ideal world, the company can use this to further expand without taking on debt.
What raspberry pi will do though, we shall see. But it’s not always so black and white.
