Bonum Certa Men Certa

Think Twice Before Buying Raspberry Pi and Adafruit Because They Work for Microsoft and Pass Data to Microsoft (and Even Promote Microsoft's Proprietary Software)

Video download link

Summary: Still failing to heed the warning or the cautionary tale of OLPC, Raspberry Pi walks its way into another scandal/blunder that is assured to alienate (as it already does) some of its biggest and most passionate longtime fans

EARLIER this year we wrote a lot about the Raspberry Pi. We've since then hoped that they abandoned any ambitions of becoming Microsoft tools/boosters, but we were likely wrong. It just keeps happening again and again (this is the third time already).

"From now on, Microsoft should be assumed to be lurking in the shadows inside the Raspberry Pi 'Foundation'. They don't seem to even understand what's wrong with that."Staff of the Raspberry Pi are once again associating themselves with criminals from Microsoft. Well, if this is their business choice, then fine... I can reach my own conclusions. I'm already heartbroken enough, seeing what they did to millions of their customers earlier this year (behind their backs, without their consent) and now the same people are marketing Microsoft. As an associate of ours put it this morning, "two companies shooting themselves in their own foot by associating with Microsoft. Their days are numbered now, regardless of how popular either happens to be at the moment. What makes the leaders of either think that somehow theirs will be the first company in history to survive "collaboration" with Microsoft?"

Another person, in IRC, said "they could have grown organically but by associating with Microsoft they expect to grow faster [...] in that case I would say bring on Raspberry Pi 5 with official Vista 11 support and see the entire hardware world being unhappy as you don't need more than a €100 machine to run the latest version of their malware..."

I've decided to do a video about it; that's my first reading of it. Very disappointing. From now on, Microsoft should be assumed to be lurking in the shadows inside the Raspberry Pi 'Foundation'. They don't seem to even understand what's wrong with that. They even conflate critics of crime with "haters".

Update: Looks like we have a new arrival?

Simon [Peyton Jones] is Principal Researcher for Microsoft UK and Chair of Computing at Schools (CAS).

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