How could we enable hacking while preventing cloning?

I wonder if everybody is on the same page at the Foundation, because various other RPF people have stated publicly more than once that they strongly welcome the Pi being cloned.  Maybe they were just giving us PR misdirection and Pete is giving us the real deal, because after all we know that the Pi can't actually be cloned because the SoC has a single supplier and Broadcom holds the strings.

What I found more interesting in Pete's article though was their "micro-vias" solution for keeping the manufacturing cost down.  Has anyone seen that solution on the Gerbers?

Morgaine.

> I wonder if everybody is on the same page at the Foundation, because various

> other RPF people have stated publicly more than once that they strongly welcome

> the Pi being cloned.

Eben said the same thing on a video I saw several weeks ago, that their

policy of welcoming cloning has changed because now that they have

distributors who have made significant investments, they need to worry

about protecting those investments.

Of course, the original story about welcoming cloning makes no sense.

If all they intended to do was to be a catalyst for low-cost computing,

they would have published the BOM, schematics and Gerbers for the alpha

and beta versions, which pre-dated their distributor agreements (which Liz

recently said were both signed on Feb 28.) 

Instead, their early presentations have shown that from the start they had

long-term plans to follow Moore's law and scale up to much more powerful

offerings over time.  I don't think Eben got his MBA for the purpose of designing

computers for other companies to clone.

What's sad is that as you note, they are already well protected from cloning

by their choice of a hard-to-get SoC.   And other companies don't seem to have

much trouble designing similar low-cost ARM boards, but with better features.

So their efforts to prevent cloning are alienating their friends, with no apparent

compensating benefit.

> Has anyone seen that solution on the Gerbers?

sorry, no Gerbers, no BOM, no current schematics, no goal of catalyzing

low-cost computing.

coder27 wrote:

 

sorry, no Gerbers, no BOM, no current schematics, no goal of catalyzing

low-cost computing.

So it's regressed to being even less open than before?  We used to have at least an up-to-date schematic.

I suspect you're right about it being a complete sham.  They seem to be in the business of manipulating reality.

btw, on September 5, 2012 at 6:48 pm Eben referred to "open-sourcing the design".

"The Foundation isn’t currently planning to support PoE, but when we open-source the design, we expect PoE-enabled variants to hit the market pretty quickly."

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1929#comments

so we are getting mixed messages.