This is not really open source, just a dump of boilerplate code that is of no real value to any hackers. It serves as a good PR stunt but is not really of any technical value.<p>I write software for ARM system on chips for living so I was naturally interested in what would a competitor's software stack look like. And I was very skeptical that they would have actually revealed anything of importance. And, unfortunately, I was right. There's nothing important here (at least in the 3d part).<p>The OpenGL implementation is still somewhere in a binary blob that is not accessible.<p>The graphics drivers would reveal crucial information about the hardware design and give an advantage to the competitors who can use that information and the software itself to make chips cheaper.<p>I'm not talking about established competitors in the high end market but the anonymous small chip companies that do chips for the $100 Android tablets you can get from Asia.<p>Note: I would really like that everyone in the SoC business would open source everything they had and and the competition would be about who designs and manufactures the badassest silicon chips. But that's just not the way it works and I can't do anything about it.
I'm curious how much of the OpenGL stack lives on the GPU. Does anyone know how low- or high-level the interface to the Videocore is? (Yes, I could just dive into the official source code release and the unofficial reverse engineering project, but that would be an inefficient use of potentially hours, when someone in the know might be able to answer in minutes)
I think everyone who announces that their hardware is "fully open-source" should answer the "Stallman test".<p>That is, answer the question "Would Stallman use this?".
Although this is good news am I correct in assuming the boot loader is still closed source? I was hoping that this would enable an official OpenBSD port but if the boot loader is still closed source this probably won't happen.
Wow, that's huge. Can't wait to get hacking on processing and openframeworks. Being able to do real accelerated computer vision stuff with the Pi will be slick.