- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
The business arm of Raspberry Pi is preparing to make an initial public offering (IPO) in London. CEO Eben Upton tells Ars that should the IPO happen, it will let Raspberry Pi’s not-for-profit side expand by “at least a factor of 2X.” And while it’s “an understandable thing” that Raspberry Pi enthusiasts could be concerned, “while I’m involved in running the thing, I don’t expect people to see any change in how we do things.”
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.
Straight up this has me concerned for the same reason
Once a company becomes beholden to shareholders that’s literally the goal
More of the same here. This is extremely depressing news.
It sucks that running a successful business can never be enough.
Prepare for Pi to start going closed source and fighting against “copycat” SBC boards. It’ll take a generation to see the enshittification set in, but Orange Pi and other similar projects are going to be the winners in a strictly profit based comparison.
I can’t wait to have to pay a subscription fee for some aspect of it.
Those are the best two examples that come to my mind. Both were great until they IPO’d.
The problem, as I see it, with IPO’s is that the company becomes beholden to shareholders who care nothing for the product, and only for the profit. Quality and profit are fairly mutually exclusive these days.
Reddit hasn’t gone public just yet
Sometimes you have to pre-suck to show investors you are serious about dismantling your company so they can feed on the corpse.
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.
They were definitely a pioneer in the SBC market. But there are tons of alternatives out there nowadays. And if you are amenable to upcycling, you can get old 1L-class x86 machines from enterprise companies doing dump/replace cycles for dirt cheap on eBay or Craigslist or FB marketplace.
TL;DR: yes it’s frustrating to see. But as consumers, we have tons of options these days, so it’s not really a catastrophic loss even if Rpi goes down the enshittification path.