The Raspberry Pi was invented to be an accessible open platform that people could modify on their own terms, wasn’t it?

And then they got some capital injections and started caring more about the commercial side, didn’t they?

They frame this as fraud-prevention but I don't really buy it.

I think of I this way. As a casual/hobbyist user, maybe I'm happy to accept a 10% risk of the device failing prematurely in exchange for saving $20 on a memory upgrade. Ok, so these unscrupulous sellers will never tell me that info up-front...but this defective-by-design system doesn't help me either. The sellers playing this shady game might not accept returns (one example of this already in the github issue linked from the main thread) and there's no sign anything's wrong until you receive and boot up. So the user is left holding the bag, with kneecapped memory capacity, and the same stability risks anyway!

If these DRAM-upgraders are really so clever, they'll find a way to bypass this (patched firmware or hacked serial in the CPU). At least, it'll work until the user is out of the 30-day period when they finally update the firmware.

Or if the CPU/mainboard can really detect this in a non-defeatable manner, why cut the usable memory? Just print something to dmesg or stderr when the user logs in. "This device's memory has been modified and may be unstable, warranty blah blah"

Apple locks down fingerprint/camera module swaps, but at least there's a plausible (afaik) security rationale for it. Seems like Raspberry just got tired of being undercut on price.

Thanks a lot RPi foundation, now I know I can get your boards with more RAM without paying the insane prices in your greedy eshop! ;-)

I bought it, if I want to use a tape drive for my RAM I will do that.

The way they price their RPi’s - are we even surprised there’s now a market for cheap modified Pi’s with more RAM?

Alright, what would it take to make a completely open source firmware for the pi? I think there was some prior effort that got discontinued...

hope this is a big wake up call to anyone that thinks rpi is remotely open

So they applied this gate in the rpi EEPROM, which is closed source.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761

They should make a form where you input the serial number and apply for a key, applying that key in config.txt disables the hardware verification checks on the bootrom.

It is not tjat well known, but this is not the first DRM bullshit from the RPi foundation - they played similar tricks with the camera interface, to force people to use their overpriced camera instead of better and cheaper third party ones.