 Hi, this is Sapin Bhatia from Muktware.com. It's an important day for us today because we are introducing a series of videos on YouTube called Mukcast. In this series of videos, we will cover a range of topics. We will interview a lot of people from Linux and free software world. We will give you a wrap up of what happened in the last seven days. So it's a weekly event. We will review software as well as hardware and at the same time, we will also discuss serious issues around GNOME Linux and open source technologies as well as communities. So when we were planning this video series, we were thinking about what topic we should pick to launch this series. We were at LinuxCon where we met and interviewed a lot of people. Those interviews are still in production stage. We are editing them and we will publish them as soon as possible. So we picked the interviewer of Ibn Uptan who is the founder of Raspberry Pi Foundation at the same time he works with Broadcast. If you look at Raspberry Pi, it doesn't need an introduction. It is one of the most popular devices around. But I was curious about the history of this device and the foundation. So I asked Ibn if he can talk a little bit about the history of Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi was an attempt by a group of us at the university in Cambridge to solve a recruitment crisis that we were having in the middle part of the last decade. So we found that we were not having it, that we had too few people applying to study computer science and we found that the range of skills that people had when they came in the door, these were still incredibly bright young people, but the range of skills they had when they came in the door was nothing like what people had in the mid-1990s. And Raspberry Pi has now evolved as a huge revolution. There is a huge open source community right where people are writing different tools for it. They are using it in a different way. Even Google released a tool called Coder which converts a Raspberry Pi device into a web server. So what I even thinks about it? Yes, what's been really fantastic about the Pi is the extent to which other people, as we've kind of pursued, because we've ended up in a situation where the amount of innovation is coming out of the community, kind of dwarfs the amount of innovation. It was really interesting to hear Gabe Newell talk about this earlier here at LinuxCon, is that if you create open platforms, then you allow your community to kind of take the lead in innovating. I think the Google Coder example is really fantastic. I didn't know anything about that until the announcement. I think one or two. Somebody else at the foundation had been speaking to Google about it, but I didn't know anything about it. So I was as surprised as anyone when I saw that last week. He's right about community and companies who deal with free software and open source should understand that even if they have the brightest and the smartest brain on the payroll, there will always be people who are smarter, who are brighter than their own employees. And the innovation from these people will dwarf the innovation and development than you do in-house. So it's always a good idea to engage with the larger open source community and benefit from their work as well. Now, if you look at the example of Coder, though he even made it clear that somebody from Raspberry Pi was working with Google, but he was surprised with that announcement. And sometimes a lot of people from free software world think of this surprise element as lack of transparency. Some people think that companies should be transparent about their projects and products from the first day when they wrote the first line of code. I do not agree with it to some extent because surprise has its own PR value at the same time. You tell everybody about a product when it's actually ready for people to see. So let's see what event says about surprises. Does it mean lack of transparency or does it have its own value? No, I think it's fantastic. I mean, you know, those are all good surprises. You know, like I say, somebody else at the fan, that's one of the other things that's an interesting learning experience for me is that the Raspberry Pi has now become a large enough organization that I don't know everything that's going on inside the organization. So, as I say, somebody else in the organization had been talking to Google about it, but it was a surprise to me and it was a great surprise. So, you know, fine, if I had a surprise like that every day, it would be a lot of fun. Exactly. And that is the beauty of surprises. Now, I'll go back to the hardware aspect of Raspberry Pi. It's not easy. It's actually very hard to bring open hardware to the market. We have seen how companies like Canonical struggled to raise funds for their Ubuntu Edge project, which eventually failed. We are also witnessing how Aaron Siego from KD is trying to bring Vivaldi Tablet to the market. He has not gone to any fundraising route. So, let's see how Raspberry Pi Foundation has managed to raise funds to bring the hardware to the market. The interesting thing about the Raspberry Pi Foundation is we're largely funded by our own, by the profits that we make from selling Raspberry Pi. So, unlike most charities, we don't do fundraising, we don't do conventional fundraising. However, we were extremely lucky at the start of the year that Google UK offered us a million dollars of funding to specifically to put pies into the hands of children in the United Kingdom and Ireland. And that was, I mean, it's been extremely helpful. So, I think we will have shipped by the end of the year. We will have shipped between 15,000 and 16,000 Raspberry Pi kits. So, that's a Raspberry Pi, a case, a power supply and an SD card. We will have shipped between 15,000 and 16,000 kits to children in the UK via our partner organizations. So, we don't, you know, we're still a very small organization. We don't do this ourselves. So, we have five or six partner organizations, including Koda Dojo, Code Club and OCR, who's one of the examination boards in the UK. And they're responsible for taking pies from us. We were funded by Google. We take pies, we deliver them to our partners, and our partners are responsible for identifying children who they think will benefit from having a pie in their bedroom. Google assists a lot of open source projects and Raspberry Pi is one of them. What is interesting about Raspberry Pi is that it is being used in schools a lot. So, I'm curious if the device has started to have an impact on the curriculum of such schools. If the device has started to change the mindset of students and teachers about open source analytics, let's say what Iben has to say about it. I think it's very early days. I think that, you know, it's really only the past six to nine months that these things have been available in sufficient quantity that education systems can order them. I think we do see some schools at the moment, particularly private schools and what we call academies, which are effectively like charter schools. And I think in American language, those are those would be charter schools. So we see some of those schools that have a little more freedom in terms of their engagement with the curriculum. We see some of those schools buying pies in quite large numbers. To get to that, I think it's going to be a while though before all schools, in particular, before conventional state schools in the UK, adopt pie in large numbers. That's right. And I hope as the device becomes more popular, it will start influencing the curriculum and will also change people's approach towards open source and Linux. If you look at the basic device, it has remained more or less same ever since it was launched. Yes, there are significant improvements. There are a lot of hardware modules that you can add to enhance the features or usability of the device. So I'm curious what's going on behind the scene. I'm curious what are the areas where the foundation is investing its resources in and at the same time, I'm curious, what was the next big thing we can expect from Raspberry Pi? I think the next big thing from us is our improved desktop support. So we've been spending a lot of time, energy, money on improving the desktop user experience on the pie. We're very committed to making the pie a great platform for particularly for multimedia. It's got a fantastic chip that we use, PCM 2835. It's got a fantastic multimedia accelerator in there. So we do see a lot of people already using the pie as an Xbox, as a XBMC, as a media center. So what we're trying to do is get some of that multimedia, get some of that multimedia capability into the hands of people who are just doing desktop applications. So with this in mind, we're spending a lot of money on Wayland, the next generation, compositing a desktop protocol. It's been a lot of money on G-Streamer, WebKit integration. Lots of these things to make the pie a more attractive general purpose machine. It's important, I guess, for two reasons. One, I guess, developing world applications. We do think that there's a big future for Linux machines and in particular on Linux machines in the developing world. And secondly, we've always believed that these machines have to be good fun. They have to be things that children will engage with. So you've got to be able to play games, you've got to be able to play video, you've got to be able to go on Facebook. So, you know, trying to make the platform a more usable, general purpose computer helps with our educational mission. That is quite ambitious and interesting, the way Raspberry Pi is evolving and it's growing bigger and bigger. I'll go back to the question of hardware, where I forgot to ask that. I really understand how hard it is to bring open hardware to the market. I was talking to Ernest Hugo of KD and he was discussing how difficult it is to talk to hardware manufacturers to bring open hardware to the market. So what challenges were there for Raspberry Pi? How did they tackle these challenges? It's been a, it was certainly very challenging to hit our cost targets. We started out, I mean, I guess we reversed into our implementation, so we started out with a cost target, we started out with this $25 target. It took us years, it took us, I think four years, from 2006 when we started, it took us four years to even have any hardware that was acceptable to us. So we're very lucky, the relationship with Broadcom has been very helpful for us in terms of getting access to a really good silicon. So a number of people including me who were involved with Pi were also involved in the BCM2835 project at Broadcom in Cambridge. So it's kind of our chip, the chip that's in Raspberry Pi is kind of our baby. So that was very helpful. But it did take us a long time, even once we had the chip, it took us a long time to put in place the supply chain, a design which was cheap enough, a design which had little enough in addition to the core processing unit. And to put in place the supply chain and business model that will allow us to operate fairly, operate sustainably at fairly thin margins. That's true and Broadcom has played a very important role in bringing this device to the market. The hardware is the USB of this device because it brings the cost of computing down. If you look at the price factor, the device makes a lot of sense in big countries like India or a lot of African countries. Though I understand that Raspberry Pi is very strong in North America and Europe, but I'm curious what plans do they have for break countries where people cannot afford computers because of their high price. So let's see if we can talk a bit about the current market of Raspberry Pi and what plans do they have for break countries. So right now North America is our largest market, I think, followed by Germany and then the UK in terms of monthly shipments. I think the UK, at least until very recently, still had the largest install base because obviously we were very big in the UK very early on. I think going forward we're putting a lot of effort into understanding how we can go to market in India more effectively, how we can go to market in South America, particularly Brazil, without currently there are large tariff barriers which push that I think a Raspberry Pi cost 70 or 80 dollars to deliver it in Brazil today. So we're trying to work out how we can not be exposed to those tariff issues. And then I think in the medium term our attention really is turning to Africa in a big way. We think Africa is an enormous opportunity for Linux. We think it's an enormous opportunity for ARM Linux and for Raspberry Pi and for other machines like Raspberry Pi. That's good news for break countries, especially for African countries and hopefully South America as well. Now I'll talk a little bit about the software and community aspect of Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi is not just about open hardware. There's a huge open source community around it and you have to maintain a fine balance between what you want and what the community needs. So what kind of relationship is there between Raspberry Pi and the open source community? We've always spent a lot of effort on community relations. My wife Liz runs our website and our Twitter presence. We've had a community relations person before we had anything else. She's been working on this for over two years now. So it's useful and important to us for several reasons. Obviously it gives us an idea of it can be as simple as it's a source of free engineering. You wouldn't believe the sorts of really valuable things that people have done. I think we got very early on, a couple of months in, we got an email from some guy saying we've got a pull request from a guy saying pull this 5-line patch here, SD card performance will double, things like that. So it's a source of very valuable engineering effort. It also gives us, by engaging with the community, we get a good idea where we should be spending our effort. We get a good idea of we don't like to pick winners. We don't like to have a fixed idea of what people should be doing with the pie. What we like to do is look at what the community is doing with the pie. Look to see whether there are places where we can do a little intervention where we can go in and spend $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 on a piece of engineering which will enable the community to move forward. Most recently, obviously, we've been doing this with Xbox Media Center. Before I wrap up this interview, I'd like to talk about the buzzword innovation. It really doesn't matter what you are doing today. What matters is what plans do you have for future? Will you remain relevant in future? So I would like to talk a little bit about what's going on at the innovation front in Raspberry Pi. So I think certainly in the short to medium term, it's all about the software. It's all about trying to make the existing platform better. I think we've said we're going to do a version which has better power performance. We are going to do a board revision in the medium term. Sometime next year, we're going to do a board revision which improves the power consumption of the device. But apart from that, we're not really very focused on hardware. We're mostly focused on tuning up the software stack. I said on my talk today, there's a lot of low hanging fruit available to people. We're very keen to go and hunt that down because ultimately we could chase off after another more powerful hardware platform, but what we'd be doing is orphaning everyone who'd already bought a Raspberry Pi. We know at some point in the future, maybe two, three years out, we're going to need to ship new hardware. We can't be shipping if we're shipping the current hardware in 2017. That's going to be a disaster for us. But we want to make sure that we give as much life as we can out of the platform we have. Thanks a lot Eben for this interview. I hope that the people who are watching this interview now know better about Raspberry Pi and more people will buy Raspberry Pi now. That brings us to the end of this first episode of Mukkaz. Just let us know what you think about it in the comments below. If you want us to review any product or project, if you want us to cover any topic, just let us know and we will try our best to cover it. So for now, bye-bye, see you next week. Happy hacking!