Re: ARMHF - Mediaplayer software?

[Mike Thompson <mpthompson@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 6:19 AM, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:

> is that an unreasonable request, steve?

I believe so, yes. The Raspbian folks are valued members of the Debian
community. They're working on a derived distro that better supports
hardware that you (and a number of other folks) don't like, as we all
know. But dislike of that hardware and the companies involved in
producing it is no excuse for ranting and raving here, at them. These
guys are working on a Debian-derived (in fact, basically just
Debian-*rebuilt*) distro for a particular piece of ARM-powered
hardware. I personally think that's just fine and on-topic here, just
as much as discussions about running Debian on other ARM-based
hardware or discusssions about developing new hardware options for
running Debian and other Free Software.

I've been following this conversation and I'm pleased that Raspbian is welcomed as a valuable contribution to the Debian community, although I certainly understand and sympathize with Luke's position regarding the platform not being completely open.  Hopefully the commercial success of the Raspberry Pi will encourage other platform vendors to enter the market with similar devices at similar price points, but with fully open hardware.  The Raspberry Pi, if anything else, demonstrated the market demand for such devices at the sub-$40 price point.

As Steve pointed out, Raspbian is indeed a more of a rebuild of Debian armhf than it is anything else.  I don't think that we've ever presented it as anything else and I hope that every user of the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian knows that they are essentially using "Debian".  If this isn't the case, please let us know how we can better communicate this important fact.   The reason it's called Raspbian is to help clarify that it's not an official Debian supported release which could confuse people if they attempted to download binaries from the Debian repositories.

It is my sincere hope that with Raspbian being the officially supported distribution for the Raspberry Pi, the end result will be millions of more new users introduced to Debian.  As they move beyond the Pi, hopefully they'll then choose to use Debian on future hardware because it works just like the "Raspberry Pi" they cut their teeth on.  Also, users do often run into issues with the closed aspects of the Pi.  This becomes an excellent opportunity to discuss with people why such limitations exist, the negative impact of such limitations on their freedom, and what the user can about the issue -- lobbying hardware vendors to open their devices and ultimately voting with their feet and their money if other choices exist.

Finally, I would really like for Raspbian to be folded back into Debian and become a supported release by the Debian Foundation.  However, I understand and appreciate the reasons why this is extremely unlikely.  With that being case, hopefully Raspbian can be seen as Debian's younger sibling that is standing upon the shoulders of the giants that created Debian armhf to begin with.

Again, I would like to thank the community on this list for being very helpful a year ago with encouragement and advice that helped make Raspbian possible.  

Mike Thompson