OLPC was meant to come with a display and a keyboard baked in, all in a (fully open) package that you could chuck across the room; a "View Source" button to let you inspect and edit the code to all your apps; UI making it easy to set up ad hoc networks to share/collaborate with anyone around you; and to put this all into the hands of children across the world, not just first world schoolchildren and the offspring of upper-middle class tinkerers.
These just the main points from OLPC's value proposition—we're not even delving into obscure or nuanced stuff yet. How does RaspberryPi's success measure at any one of these things, let alone all of them?
That is a nice interview. Eben Upton understood something pretty basic about manufacturing that the OLPC people aggressively ignored: economies of scale.
I can make 10,000 Raspberry Pi's for the same unit price I can make 1 million Raspberry Pis. There's a curve, of course, but that curve for the Raspberry Pi flattens very quickly.
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I'm only seeing this from the outside but I think the main difficulty that OLPC encountered is that their minimum economic quantity was very high, and so they had to and get these big government orders in order to justify building enough units so they could hit their cost targets. I don't know what the minimum economic quantity for OLPC was but it was probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, and they had trouble to achieve that.
When it was early days for OLPC and they were receiving lots of positive press attention, I saw Nicholas Negroponte argue strenuously against selling directly to industry or the public as a distraction that was beneath the dignity of the project. At that moment, it was obvious they had no hope of hitting their $100/laptop target.
Yes - it was the classic "big bang" project, the only options were massive worldwide success or total obscurity. It relied on top-down funding to push it to the intended users. Whereas Pi bootstrapped from tiny initial funding.
The main problem of OLPC was Segway-level hubris, in my opinion.
RPi does basically nothing that OLPC was intended to achieve, though it does a lot that OLPC wasn't intended to. OLPC, unsurprisingly, did a lot of what OLPC was intended to.
RPi did some of the things computing enthusiasts wanted OLPC to do that weren't actually OLPC goals.
No specific allegations. I just find it odd that Broadcom apparently still sell these chips at a low price only (?) to the RasPi foundation - just because of a personal relationship - someone who worked at Broadcom then created the RasPi foundation.
What does Broadcom get out of this exclusive relationship? (Is it still exclusive?) It just smelled odd when I first heard about this way back in 2012 or so when it first launched. Four years later there's lots of volume, but the same arrangement is still going strong. I find this peculiar.
The arrangement is unusual, but I wonder why you're using words like "odd" and "peculiar" to describe it, as if Broadcom has ulterior motives.
Broadcom sells parts cheaply or at cost and in return gets some free advertising and the appearance of being altruistic. It all seems fairly uncomplicated.
>"And more importantly, what do I (as a RPi user) lose out?"
If nothing else, you miss out from the benefits of stronger competition. The Odroid-W is one example of a product that appeared to be cancelled because of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's close ties with Broadcom:
OLPC was meant to come with a display and a keyboard baked in, all in a (fully open) package that you could chuck across the room; a "View Source" button to let you inspect and edit the code to all your apps; UI making it easy to set up ad hoc networks to share/collaborate with anyone around you; and to put this all into the hands of children across the world, not just first world schoolchildren and the offspring of upper-middle class tinkerers.
These just the main points from OLPC's value proposition—we're not even delving into obscure or nuanced stuff yet. How does RaspberryPi's success measure at any one of these things, let alone all of them?