RPi use cases explained

Stuart,

   Welcome!  The moderation on this forum is night-and-day different from rpi.org

or wikipedia.  You can make insightful observations here without fear of banning,

outing, thread-locking, reverting, etc.  If your wikipedia edits are something you

would like to discuss here, feel free.

In fact, I believe music and software have a great deal in common.  In both cases, you have a static representation -- a source code.  The source code is mostly linear, but does include looping and conditional constructs.

Have you seen Knuth's paper: "The Complexity of Songs"?

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/arvindn/misc/knuth_song_complexity.pdf

April edition of Comms. ACM.

coder27 wrote:

 

Eben [cut] apparently had his position as Director terminated as of 07 Jan 2013:

     http://opencorporates.com/filings/181509848

or maybe as early as 18 December 2012:

      http://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/06758215

That seems clear enough, but "Why?" is a more difficult question.  I wonder if there is some kind of rule in UK about directors of non-profits not being allowed to simultaneously be directors of for-profit companies on which the non-profit is dependent?  Or maybe some kind of tax reason?

Maybe someone should simply ask him at his next personal appearance in an RPF role.  I remember from his early days that he used to answer questions quite clearly without the evasion that is typical of politicians and PR people.

With such a large numebr of RPI malcontents runingon this forum I can only say it will be a matter of time before the Fanboi horde finds us and chases us about with torches and pitchforks

Maybe someone should simply ask him at his next personal appearance in an RPF role. 

Maybe RPF should set up a web site with an "About us" page that says who their officers

and directors are.

Maybe RPF should set up a web site with a forum where questions like this can be asked.

Maybe E14 can tell us who signs any recent contracts on behalf of RPF.

lots of maybe's.

With such a large numebr of RPI malcontents runingon this forum I can only say it will be a matter of time before the Fanboi horde finds us and chases us about with torches and pitchforks

Perhaps.  But the Fanboi horde has been told by JamesH that it's worthwhile reading this forum,

and not too many have shown up to cause trouble.  The ones that do, it's pretty obvious who they are.

by jamesh » Mon Sep 24, 2012 12:51 pm

Please take some of what said on that forum with pinch of salt - lots of pie in the sky thinking on there, which tend to gives people the wrong idea. They don't have any more information available than anyone here - less in fact than the mods here. Obviously we cannot make changes to that site when there is wrong information - that's E14's moderators jobs and they don't actually have any as far as I can tell! It also tends to be frequented by people who have been banned from this site for various reasons, so can have some rather bitter and unpleasant commentary. That said, there is also lots of good information there, so worthwhile keeping an eye on it. Just keep the above in mind.

That seems clear enough, but "Why?" is a more difficult question.  I wonder if there is some kind of rule in UK about directors of non-profits not being allowed to simultaneously be directors of for-profit companies on which the non-profit is dependent?  Or maybe some kind of tax reason?

OK, here's what I think Andy has been struggling to explain.

UK charities have rules about for-profit trading: 

  http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk/publications/cc35.aspx#d

A trading subsidiary must be used in any case where there would be a significant risk to the assets of the charity, if it were to carry on non-primary purpose trading itself (see C8). ...

RPF apparently felt the need to spend a few hundred thousand dollars of what would

have likely been scarce charitable funds to buy up 50,000 256MB RAM chips around

the October 2012 launch of the 512MB version.

RPF also apparently felt the need to expand its marketing scope to include non-charitable

industrial applications such as digital signage.

So the RPF set up a trading subsidiary, "Raspberry Pi (Trading) Limited",

Company number: 08207441, on September 10, 2012.

Eben was appointed a director of the subsidiary on Jan 07, 2013,

coinciding with the termination of his directorship of RPF, per RES01

dated December 18, 2012.

http://bizzy.co.uk/uk/08207441/raspberry-pi-trading  (see "documents" tab)

The subsidiary's directors are listed here:

https://www.duedil.com/company/08207441/raspberry-pi-trading-limited/people

with only Eben and Jack Lang in common with the original six RPF directors.

A 30 April 2013 news report explained:

Eben Upton, executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation said: “On the basis of guidance received from our professional advisers, we've separated the existing trading activities of the Foundation into a wholly-owned trading subsidiary, Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd, while the Foundation continues to pursue its original educational mission. This is apparently considered best practice for charities which conduct significant commercial activity – charity shops would be a good example.”

http://www.businessweekly.co.uk/hi-tech/15343-california-boost-as-raspberry-pi-takes-new-commercial-view

Maybe now we know what Pete Lomas was hinting at on Sept 25, 2012, when he wrote:

What we learned is that you have to sell out (a little) to sell (a lot).

And it may shed some new light on Eben's comments:

I don't believe that there was any way that we could have done this as a commercial venture. I mean, you see the number of sales and it's easy to think, “Wow, I wish I could make some profit out of that!”. You're generating all this value and none of it is going to your wallet. But in practice actually it's fantastic.

http://www.techspot.com/article/531-eben-upton-interview/

Excellent bit of research, coder27. I was looking forward to seeing RPi's 2012 numbers on the Charity Commission's website, but now they've started carving things up those numbers won't be quite so meaningful on their own...

As Jonathan said, very good research.

I now look forward to the RPF forum users openly discussing the for-profit activities of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd, and quantifying the amounts extracted as profit versus those used for educational goals.  I'm sure the moderators there will be totally happy with letting the discussion proceed.