🚀 go-pugleaf

On 08/03/2012 11:46, Nico Coesel wrote:
> David Brown<david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com>  wrote:
>
>> On 07/03/2012 23:00, Don McKenzie wrote:
>>> OLinuXino, a serious Rasberry Pi competitor?
>>>
>>> After talks at the recent Embedded conference in Germany (2012), Olimex
>>> decided to go ahead with the production of two new boards that were very
>>> similar to the Rasberry Pi. The first one they should have prototypes in
>>> the coming weeks.
>>>
>>> The second will be 3 to 6 months before production boards will be seen,
>>> so I won't cover it in this report, however the CPU specs on this second
>>> board, are almost identical to the RPi microcontroller chip, and board.
>>>
>>> Olimex describes this board as a bridge to the linux development
>>> community and the Duinomite/Arduino/Maple/Pinguino world of developers.
>>>
>>> This will be completely Open Hardware / Open Source Project, all CAD
>>> files will be available so everyone can download modify, and use them.
>>> Same with the software.
>>>
>>> More Info:
>>> http://www.duinomite.com/olinuxino-a-serious-rasberry-pi-competitor/
>>>
>>> Cheers Don...
>>>
>>
>>
>> It's a nice idea and initiative, but I don't see it going anywhere.
>> These boards need community support - there are lots of groups who have
>> ported different Linux distributions and software for the Pi.  Part of
>
> The (community) support is already there. Freescale has all the
> software (Linux and Win CE BSPs) and documentation on their website
> and offers several fora to users.
>

Support from Freescale is something totally different from community 
support.  It's a good start, but it is not the same.  It just means that 
the basic BSP is in place for Android, Linux and Wince of some 
particular version.  There is no guarantee that any of the changes, 
patches, drivers, etc., make their way back to the mainline.  There is 
no guarantee that the anything will be supported in future versions. 
There is no guarantee that source will be available for third-party work 
commissioned by Freescale, or that the source that is provided is 
suitable for future use, or that there will be support in the future.  I 
have seen these sorts of problems before from Freescale, where we had an 
iMX evaluation card.  It came with a Linux build and BSP.  But the chip 
had a graphics accelerator, and the driver for that was partially closed 
source, and developed by a third-party (paid for by Freescale).  So we 
had to choose between keeping the out-of-date Linux kernel provided with 
the BSP, or compiling a new kernel but losing the accelerated graphics. 
  Freescale would not pay the third-party to update the graphics drivers 
- they were already promoting the next iMX chip instead.  I don't know 
if Freescale has done it better this time, but that's a danger you face 
when support is by manufacturer only.

The Pi has /real/ community support - there are already half a dozen 
well-known Linux distributions that support it, as well as major 
software packages like xmbc.