It's a common misconception that being public means shareholder value must be maximised, and that means profits. This is not actually the case. https://www.legislate.ai/blog/does-the- ... lder-valueOnce a company IPOs it is legally required to maximise value for its shareholders. It went to the LSE which isn't quite as strict on this as the US exchanges, but if Microsoft offered them a really good deal to bundle which was shown to increase profits then they'd be required to take it. And after all Microsoft could buy RPL with petty cash if they wanted to.
Lot of people say they will leave company xyz after it IPOs or is MAed and policies changed, but few do as they discover the alternatives are just so bad which is why the company that IPed or MAed was so valuable in the first place.
Regarding graphics drivers, the firmware on the Pi 5 has NO graphics support, it's all done in the ARM side drivers. This means anyone can look at those drivers and develop their own from them. There is NO firmware support required. The same now applies to 2D acceleration (was dispmanx, now DRM/KMS), camera (was proprietary, now libcamera) and CODECs (was OpenMAX, now V4L2).
So anyone can take the current Open Source Pi codebase, and develop a whole set of Windows drivers from them.
The only problem is bootloaders where we are still proprietary, due to the nature of the SoC.
Statistics: Posted by jamesh — Mon Nov 25, 2024 10:16 am