[aceperry]

"My impression has been that this has mostly been about giving a cheap, easy to use software platform, and they've succeeded at that because of the price/performance balance."

It was chosen mainly for the low price. The performance was a little subpar but it had the advantage of a decent video graphics block.

"Now that this platform is more established, I imagine they can apply some pressure to get things like the video core to be more open"

Broadcom was one of the worst companies to get documentation from, even for their own customers. Unless you were a big customer, you're lucky to get the time of day from them. Hopefully, their new owners Avago will have a different attitude towards the open source community.

[superflyguy]

I doubt the pi foundation are remotely concerned with how open the soc is as it has absolutely no impact on the core uses of the pi. They're smart people and would have made a different choice were it the case.

[tinus_hn]

I've seen statements from them about this. They do care but they also are pragmatic and made the choices they had to make to reach their goal, which was to have a small cheap programmable device with enough power to make cool things easily. Openness came second to that.