We now have consumerism disguised as hacking, in my opinion.
iOS jailbreaking and Cyanogenmod, for example. A few clever people doing the hard the work and the rest of the users out there clamoring "WHERE IS MY FREE THING THAT I WANT NOW!".
Rpi will be the same thing. Someone resourceful and determined will get XBMC, or Android, or whatever running on this chip and the rest will dutifully follow the instructions and either a) have fun for a week and throw it in the drawer or b) live on the forums forever and bitch about what else isn't finished.
Even stuff like Arduino is on the fringe of this. We've taken a fairly simple microprocessor and wrapped it in IDEs and plug-and-play boards to the point where most users have learned nothing about embedded systems development, save for how to wire up an LED or stepper motor without frying your power supply.
I don't really get this complaint. The spectrum of technical investment in your own devices spans all the way from soldering your own boards and implementing custom hardware logic with FPGAs to hacking together your own firmware for hardware you purchased to installing an OS that gives you low level access to being able to run programs you wrote yourself to having to buy all the software from an app store to having a bread machine with 3 buttons on the top that you can press to tell it what to do.
Depending on what you want to do, any of these points on the spectrum can be perfectly valid. Even the bread machine can have you making bread out of scratch ingredients yourself using a recipe you control instead of just buying a loaf of bread at the store.
I agree with wanorris. You're applying an incredibly strict definition whatever term you wish to use for the opposite of consumerism. I don't understand why you seem to be arguing that making an Arduino or RPi accessible and low-cost somehow cheapens the value it holds for the rest of the community.
Yes, there will be some consumers who are buying these PCs. But without them, would XBMC or Cyanogenmod exist? With that in mind, what's the marginal value of one more RPi user?
iOS jailbreaking and Cyanogenmod, for example. A few clever people doing the hard the work and the rest of the users out there clamoring "WHERE IS MY FREE THING THAT I WANT NOW!".
Rpi will be the same thing. Someone resourceful and determined will get XBMC, or Android, or whatever running on this chip and the rest will dutifully follow the instructions and either a) have fun for a week and throw it in the drawer or b) live on the forums forever and bitch about what else isn't finished.
Even stuff like Arduino is on the fringe of this. We've taken a fairly simple microprocessor and wrapped it in IDEs and plug-and-play boards to the point where most users have learned nothing about embedded systems development, save for how to wire up an LED or stepper motor without frying your power supply.