[trengrj]

The Free Software Foundation has a good resource here https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers on the "relative" freedom of single board computers.

The "enforced" binary blob really turns me off the Raspberry Pi. I bought a BeagleBone black as you can actually boot them without non-free software. Recently BeagleBone's GPU manufacturer Imagination Technologies made comments that the PowerVR chip https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/37h2a9/i_work_for... is planned to be open sourced.

If this happens I hope a lot more people will switch over to the BeagleBone rather than head in the direction of cheaper and cheaper closed ARM platforms. For me, the promising part of these single board ARM computers is that we may escape from running untrusted binaries and avoid things like Intel's Management Engine.