I'm a maker. I've been using your boards for years. I've recommended their use to countless people, advocated for your goals, and remained excited for everything you had done to further coding in education. You were doing good work, and had an immense amount of goodwill within the maker community. Have credit where it's due.

But your recent antics are wholly unacceptable.

Firstly, you have abandoned the maker community in recent years by prioritizing your industrial customers over them. The very same maker community that fueled the wide adoption of your products, the people who tirelessly evangelized your mission, are being left behind.

You're right - people are cross that they can't get your products any more. And that's because you're not making them for us any more. And we know it.

Secondly, your recent "Hey, we hired a cop!" post is concerning. UK law enforcement has a long history of terrible behavior in infiltrating activist circles, establishing sexual relationships with activists, and in some cases abandoning the children they fathered in those relationships.

This is a well-documented pattern of behavior, and is still playing out in the courts. The individual you hired most likely had a direct hand in enabling that behavior, as his role was in developing surveillance techniques. That history should be considered shameful, yet somehow you've decided it's a selling point.

This raises further concerns when considered within the context of your recent pivot towards prioritizing industrial customers over the maker community. In many perfectly reasonable ways, this could be considered a signal to government and law enforcement agencies of your willingness and intent to expand your business with them.

After all, you also manufacture small cameras as well as small, network-enabled computers. Now you're advertising that you've brought someone in-house with extensive experience in law enforcement under a dubious title (what exactly is the job description of a "Maker-in-Residence" anyhow?).

It's clear that your original vision has changed, and not for the better.

All of this is concerning enough. But when these perfectly valid criticisms and concerns were brought to the attention of your Fediverse instance, your brand ambassador responded with glib dismissals and began blocking the very people who have supported you for the past decade.

Not to mention the absolutely ridiculous recent claims by your co-founder, Liz Upton, that this backlash is due to not putting a CW on a picture of pigs in a blanket. That's patently absurd, and had she taken any time whatsoever to seriously look at the conversation, she would know it.

But, again - we're not the customers you care about any more. And we know it.

The fact is, you have managed to burn down a decade's worth of goodwill in the span of a day or so by being condescending, inconsiderate, and tone-deaf towards your most loyal customers and their extremely valid concerns. And on a personal level, I'm wildly disappointed and feel a certain amount of betrayal.

Of course I'll be vigorously recommending your competitors from now on, for both moral and practical reasons. There are far superior alternatives on the market already. At the basest level, I'm quite comfortable forgetting that #RaspberryPi is even an option for a single-board computer, and never mentioning the name to another potential maker again.

Not that it matters, since we can't even get your boards without an obscene markup anyways.

#RaspberryBye

So it looks like the Raspberry Pi Foundation has finally jumped the shark. They hired a surveillance cop as a maker in residence, which is Dumb Move No. 1, but when people on Mastodon began voicing their concerns, whoever runs the account responded with mocking and derision, telling users to "chill" and generally acting like an asshole.

That's not the way to handle this. At all.

As it stands, if the Raspberry Pi Foundation wants to go this way, everyone has every right to stop supporting them. Besides RPis being next to impossible to get ahold of nowadays, thanks to the stupid move of supporting corps over hobbyists (as I understand it), this move of hiring a surveillance cop is a massive slap in the face of the marginalized groups that supported and relied on Raspberry Pis for many projects.

So I'm making my decision: my next SBCs will most likely be Banana Pis or Pine64's RockPro boards. Both are inexpensive and plentiful.

In all good faith, I will not be supporting the Raspberry Pi Foundation for this move, nor will I support them in any future endeavors, but also, I implore people to not just dump out your Raspberry Pis; creating e-waste in protest doesn't help.

Donate your Pis, or just put them away if you don't want to use them any longer. Find homes for them; throwing them out when they're hard for others to find is wasteful and the wrong message to send.

I'll continue to use my Pis, because I bought or received them long before this mess. But I will not be giving them any more of my money.

That's how you protest their actions: by closing your wallet to them.

#RaspberryPi