Letter to DG Int Markt

Dear Mrs *****,

I have to find your answer nothing short of appalling as:

a) it says the European Commission considers that it’s own directive on public procurement is not, to quote your words, a “common approach on how to deal with those in a consistent matter across all EU member states”.

b) your words “the Commission services do not dispose of the expert knowledge required to access technical and complex problems such as those” I have submitted are probably the most extreme and voluntary admission of incompetence that I have ever had knowledge about as…

c) there is nothing complex about an extremely clear violation of EU and national law when a public procurement restricts competition in the internal market by explicitly excluding all non Microsoft suppliers by demanding computers with Microsoft Windows.

Thus, I demand to know:

1) what information was given by the Portuguese authorities;

2) documentation on what your services did during all these years regarding this issue and

3) who do I appeal to, as it is evident that DG Internal Market either does not have the know how, or wants to do its job.

Best regards,
Rui Seabra

Why I’m not buying the Raspberry Pi

Some people will claim it’s “pragmatic” to accept proprietary firmware in order to get your fabulous 3D and 2D acceleration out of your graphics card.

So what has been the result of accepting that so called “pragmatism”?

Now you can’t even boot a computer because they put the 1st stage bootloader in the GPU firmware…

Is there a GPU binary?
Yes. The GPU binary also contains the first stage bootloader.

This is fishy, and it may be a first attempt at trying to circunvent software freedom, after all, if you accepted the firmware for the graphics card, surely you’ll accept the firmware to boot.

Sure you can probably boot any OS from the SD card, but it may very well be running under an hypervisor… you may be in your own little VM and someday, that might bite you when you least expect it.

Maybe this doomsday scenario is not happenening with the Raspberry Pi, but it seems, to me, like the proverbial slippery slope in action. You ceded, now you have to cede a bit more, and when you notice, you can’t go back up again.

This is why I won’t buy a Raspberry Pi.

This so called “pragmatism” has resulted in an even worse situation than before and I won’t support that, no matter how cheap the device is.