[Freedombox-discuss] Add Raspberry Pi as a reference platform?

Tim Retout diocles at debian.org
Thu Oct 10 21:31:24 UTC 2013


On Thu, 2013-10-10 at 11:26 +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> A way to tap into the resource of people already owning an Raspberry
> Pi and interested in taking back control over their own computer use
> and communication needs, would be to announce that Raspberry Pi will
> also be a reference platform for the Freedombox project.

I think we ought to support as much hardware as possible.  But
announcing Raspberry Pi as a "reference platform" is likely to be
controversial, because of the non-free blobs required.

Now, I have always heard Bdale talk about the Debian-based Freedombox as
a "reference implementation", implying to me that other groups would
build different compatible Freedombox software implementations (e.g.
Freedombox on Fedora, which afaik doesn't exist).

So I would suggest shifting the language slightly; there is only one
"reference implementation" (i.e. Freedombox on Debian), which may work
on various hardware platforms.  Make the reference implementation
hardware-agnostic as far as possible, and then individual users can make
the decision about whether Raspberry Pi is acceptable.

Otherwise, we're still stuck in the hardware business, just a different
piece of hardware.  I confidently predict the current generation RPi
Model B will look dreadfully underpowered in two years, and we'd better
be ready to support whatever hardware comes along next.

That's not to say that you shouldn't write the support for setting up
servers vs. routers vs. mesh networks and so on - many people might find
that useful, and you could achieve the goal of attracting more people to
the project.  How cross-platform can this be made?

-- 
Tim Retout <diocles at debian.org>
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