[Oberon] Unlimited Oberon System for any board

[Joerg]

In this discussion, I miss a little bit the SW cost..
Jörg

> Am 06.05.2020 um 22:47 schrieb Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
> 
> 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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