Eben Upton: An educational life of Pi (The H)

Incidentally, I was at your talk on the FreedomBox at FSCONS 2012 where you placed a great deal of emphasis on self-maintaining solutions, and I think that this is another area where the Raspberry Pi people should be reaching out and actively collaborating with initiatives like the FreedomBox project instead of just seeing which party will give them the goodies first. For example, Oracle seem rather interested in pushing Java-based educational solutions on Raspberry Pi, but I don't think it would be wise to let them run the show.

Certainly, the Raspberry Pi has triggered a cascade of low price devices capable of running Linux and acting as PC replacements, although there were already similar devices available, and with statements being made about how the focus is to "tack back towards our founding aims", I can understand how people might be a bit suspicious of the project's priorities and motivations. After all, teaching programming is something that can be done without a specific device being made available, and surely the existing initiatives in this area would benefit from more attention and, of course, a share of the free, favourable publicity showered on Raspberry Pi by the mainstream media.

Then again, just getting everyone to work together that should be working together is an exercise in itself.