It has the ecosystem. Not just the technical side, but it has mindshare in education. There will be more people who know what a Raspberry Pi is than an SBC.
I'm being flippant, but I think the point is important. What Raspberry Pi really brought to the table was making hardware hacking feel accessible. The sorts of people they're appealing to aren't looking for the fastest or best system, they're looking for something that feels easy and straightforward. They're cheap enough that I doubt price is a major consideration, and openness is almost a non-consideration among the populace at large.
Community + Support + Ecosystem + Everyone else has bad GPU drivers. Almost everyone else has GPU drivers which only work in Android and don't support Linux desktop. Unaccelerated Linux desktop is no fun.
Somehow they have managed to convince people they are open source (they aren't) that they are a good architecture (they aren't) and they are good to teach children about hardware on (they aren't).
I've always felt that the we've never actually seen anything really use the Raspberry Pi to its fullest because of closed-source graphics drivers and closed-source graphics schematics. Is this realistic?
Not really. To be fair, all modern GPUs are closed-source and the Raspberry Pi actually has the only mobile GPU with some public documentation. Sure, there are open-source implementations of Mali and other GPUs, but they just don't work well. Unlike many knockoff boards, you can build the proprietary blob into your code and get great performance (see Kodi or VLC, which can play 1080p30 and has a very smooth UI on the Pi).
As for closed source schematics, it doesn't really matter because there is no way to purchase the processor powering the Pi yourself. Some clone manufacturer tried to buy the BCM2835 in like 2014, but Broadcom had a 100,000 order minimum, and so the clone manufacturer just couldn't afford it. So, schematics aren't really useful.
Finally, a HUGE reason why the graphics software is closed-source inside the GPU is legal issues. The GPU contains dedicated video decode/encode blocks which have patents which require licensing. RPi gets around this by keeping the GPU closed source and selling MP2/VC1 decode licenses. If the Raspberry Pi foundation distributed open-source GPU software which could use those decoding blocks, they would be underwater with lawsuits from multiple patent bodies.
This isn't some toy reverse engineered implementation; the principal author is Eric Anholt who is employed by Broadcom for pretty much building this and other open-source drivers.
If you are still using the closed driver dump, it's because you haven't been paying attention.
The OpenGL driver mostly works, but it has some... issues. There is a reason why the RPi Foundation doesn't enable it by default.
I have used the OpenGL driver before, and it breaks some weird things (e.g. Programs which use the proprietary blob such as Chromium or VLC slow to a crawl, boot splash screens don't work, a few other weird things.)
I still, however, don't get why the RPi Foundation doesn't have the ability to enable the driver in the GUI tool. You have to manually use `raspi-config` in the terminal, which the GUI has replaced in almost everything but this.
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I'm being flippant, but I think the point is important. What Raspberry Pi really brought to the table was making hardware hacking feel accessible. The sorts of people they're appealing to aren't looking for the fastest or best system, they're looking for something that feels easy and straightforward. They're cheap enough that I doubt price is a major consideration, and openness is almost a non-consideration among the populace at large.
Somehow they have managed to convince people they are open source (they aren't) that they are a good architecture (they aren't) and they are good to teach children about hardware on (they aren't).
As for closed source schematics, it doesn't really matter because there is no way to purchase the processor powering the Pi yourself. Some clone manufacturer tried to buy the BCM2835 in like 2014, but Broadcom had a 100,000 order minimum, and so the clone manufacturer just couldn't afford it. So, schematics aren't really useful.
Finally, a HUGE reason why the graphics software is closed-source inside the GPU is legal issues. The GPU contains dedicated video decode/encode blocks which have patents which require licensing. RPi gets around this by keeping the GPU closed source and selling MP2/VC1 decode licenses. If the Raspberry Pi foundation distributed open-source GPU software which could use those decoding blocks, they would be underwater with lawsuits from multiple patent bodies.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/tree/master/src/gal...
This isn't some toy reverse engineered implementation; the principal author is Eric Anholt who is employed by Broadcom for pretty much building this and other open-source drivers.
If you are still using the closed driver dump, it's because you haven't been paying attention.
I have used the OpenGL driver before, and it breaks some weird things (e.g. Programs which use the proprietary blob such as Chromium or VLC slow to a crawl, boot splash screens don't work, a few other weird things.)
I still, however, don't get why the RPi Foundation doesn't have the ability to enable the driver in the GUI tool. You have to manually use `raspi-config` in the terminal, which the GUI has replaced in almost everything but this.