All I know is that basically every IPO I’ve seen has eventually made the product worse. I have no data to back this up, just feelings, but still. As soon as a company starts worrying about shareholders, corners start getting cut or prices start going up for no reason.

while I’m involved

I guess that’s the best one can hope for in top-down corporations. I wish they’d make it a workers’ co-op for their and the community’s long term sake but who am I kidding… 🥲

This is the best summary I could come up with:

CEO Eben Upton confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg News that Raspberry Pi had appointed bankers at London firms Peel Hunt and Jefferies to prepare for “when the IPO market reopens.”

Raspberry previously raised money from Sony and semiconductor and software design firm ARM, and it sought public investment.

Upton also told The Register that Raspberry Pi "does interesting work and makes money, and I don’t think those imperatives are going to change.

Still, news of the potential transformation of Raspberry Pi Ltd from the private arm of the education-minded Raspberry Pi Foundation into a publicly traded company, beholden to profit generation for shareholders, reverberated about the way you’d expect on Reddit, Hacker News, and elsewhere.

The company writes that “profits from the sale of Raspberry Pi computers help fund the Foundation’s educational initiatives.”

The UK government’s Companies House lists the foundation as having 75 percent ownership of shares and voting rights, with the ability to add or remove directors, though that information was last submitted in 2016.

The original article contains 411 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

I was already planning on never buying another Pi based on how they fucked over consumers in favor of business customers during the shortages. This only reinforces it. Companies going public irreversibly eradicates any and all consumer value in favor of shareholders and I do not support any company that actively chooses that path.

I wouldn’t necessarily read too much into this.

I think most people’s aversions to the concept of IPOs stems from the fact that it lies at the end of the not-too-uncommon lifecycle of VC-backed companies:

• Get VC investment
• Subsidize your product using said investment
• Grow like hell on account of handing out things at a too-low price
• Prepare for IPO by worsening the deal for customers to improve financials (also known as enshittification)
• Use IPO money to pay off VCs and leave both them and founders with a large chunk of money

Post-IPO the company has to abide by the regular rules of being a company, meaning that they never really re-capture what it was like when they had a large stack of free money to make all deals sweeter than the competition.

All this to say is that the damage is done once you raise VC capital. Raspberry Pi has raised one fairly small round, so there’s potentially some damage done there, but it’s way less than your average tech startup did throughout the years, so this doesn’t necessarily have to mean that everything will go to hell now.

No change in current focus, which happens to be the business sector. :)

RIP RPI

If people think that an IPO means we’re going to … push prices up, push the margins up, push down the feature sets, the only answer we can give is, watch us. Keep watching," he said. “Let’s look at it in 15, 20 years’ time.”

What a fucking lame answer.

RasPi was cool at one time, but that time has long since passed.