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INTERVIEW This month Eben and Liz Upton from the Raspberry Pi Foundation kindly put aside some time for an informal interview with the MagPi team. Despite the couple having not eaten and coming directly out of another interview, and after a long day, they were as bouncy, fun and energetic as ever.
Q1 : Do you feel that you have
already achieved your goals, and if not, what still needs to be done? Eben: We have not achieved our goals. Specifically, we have achieved NONE of our formal goals, which are all around education. It's a long-duration plan! I will know we achieved our goals when I am drawing a pension and the country still has an economy that can pay for it! Liz: Blimey, no, the competition [see the Raspberry Pi Homepage for details of the Summer Code Contest] is a really good start, but we're not going to be any way into achieving our goals for a year - and we won't know if we have for another 5 years or so. There's also a load of supporting stuff out there as you guys know, we can't believe how helpful the MagPi material is. CAS are currently doing a free manual for teachers (or students, or anyone else who is interested) - I was just talking to them today about illustrations. And it's been completely brilliant to watch the software
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community grow so fast; we still can't believe it. Q2: What is your attitude towards
commercial Pi projects? Some projects might get very large and need a large quantity of Pis. I've searched the forum but haven't found conclusive proof that you approve of commercial projects? Liz: We totally approve of them. Eben: More than that; we think they're completely vital to the future success of Raspberry Pi. People shouldn't think that just because we're a charity we're not in favour of people making money. You should totally quote Peter Mandelson - "I am intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."
MagPi: [Note - following this interview the order limits have been lifted and multiple Raspberry Pis can now be ordered.]