Raspberry Pi Scores In Broadcom Bid For Openness

Raspberry Pi has claimed itself an early birthday present today (technically it was launched on the 29th, but there's no such day this year), praising a newly announced move by Broadcom after hearing the long-lamented plight of developers: it has released the full source for its VideoCore IV graphics, opening it up to bug fixes and more. In light of this, Raspberry Pi is offering hefty monetary bounty in a competition.

Thus far, the use of binary drivers has meant developers and the Linux community and such have been unable to issue bug fixes for issues that arise, and that the graphics stack couldn't be improved, not to mention the trouble presented by porting an OS sans the help of a vendor. Pointing to this trouble and modern trends towards openness, Broadcom made it decision to loosen its grip.

Broadcom is releasing the complete documentation for the graphics core, as well as the full source for the graphics stack, doing so with a BSD 3-clause license. In light of this, Raspberry Pi has announced a $10,000 bounty to the "first person to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi using these drivers."

Anyone anywhere can play their hand in the bounty, but should be sure to check out the rules RP has published ahead of time. As a side note, Raspberry Pi pointed out in its blog post that it has sold 2.5 million of its little units since its launch — happy birthday, indeed.

SOURCE: Raspberry Pi and Broadcom