Broadcom’s newly open-sourced chip opens new doors for Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi has claimed itself an early birthday present today, praising a newly announced move by Broadcom after hearing the long-lamented plight of developers: it has released the full source for its VideoCore IV graphics, opening it up to bug fixes and more. In light of this, Raspberry Pi is offering hefty monetary bounty in a competition. Thus far, the use of binary drivers has meant developers and the Linux community and such have been unable to issue bug fixes for issues that arise, and that the graphics stack couldn’t be improved. 

Your Raspberry Pi is about to start doing several exciting new tricks, as Broadcom decided to finally open source a sister chip to the BCM2835 onboard every RasPi. It’s been a short, chaotic ride for the inexpensive computer we know as the Raspberry Pi. This tiny computer has been making headlines for several years now as it opened new doors to inexpensive computers and promoting the idea that makers and developers can build unique new concepts without breaking the bank. There’s clearly a lot more that can be done with this hardware, but up to now it had been limited by Broadcom’s proprietary video stack. With a little luck and some clever developers driven by an exciting new contest, those limits will soon be a thing of the past.