[Oberon] Unlimited Oberon System for any board

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 6 May 2020 at 20:42, Skulski, Wojciech
<skulski at pas.rochester.edu> wrote:
>
> Closed source. The CPU is manufactured by Broadcom. You cannot buy the chip. You cannot make your own board. I read a story of a company who made prototypes and then Broadcom flatly refused to sell them chips for production of the board. It put them out of business. This is called monopoly.

Absolutely, yes.

But one has to start somewhere, and this is _the_ best-selling series
of SBCs in the world. Once you have _one_ ARM port, then adjusting it
and getting other ARM SBCs working will be significantly easier. The
difference is, as I've outlined, things like bootloaders are much
easier on RasPi, and it has the tooling. In terms of source to study,
there are more native OSes for RasPi than for all the other ARM boards
put together: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan 9, RISC OS. In terms of
tooling there is Ultibo to use and study: a FreePascal unikernel,
essentially.

No other ARM SBC can offer anything even remotely comparable. Most run
a very small selection of Linux distros and nothing else. On RasPi
there is not only the official Raspbian, with closed-source
binary-blob drivers, there are also all-FOSS Linuxes such as openSUSE,
Fedora and Ubuntu, all with full source available.

It is arguably easier on the Pi *because* you don't need a bootloader
or hardware initialisation code. Get that working and _then_ add to it
to get it working on somewhat more open boards such as the Pine64.

But having a $5 as the entry point and a full-featured $25 machine,
with a CPU used in a thousand new product lines a year, is a good way
to get a community interested.

> > I'm in Czechia and I bought my last RasPi locally. Intra-EU trade is unlikely to suffer at the tiny hands of Little Donny.
>
> I would not be so sure.

We'll see.

It could well be that we're hurtling to World War 3 prompted by rapid
environmental collapse anyway. There are bigger things to worry about
that one or 2 countries' blond-haired idiots-in-charge.

-- 
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