by OLIMEX Ltd in raspberrypi

I got interesting email this morning:

Hi Mr. Tsvetan Usunov, How are you? This is David from XXX which is a professional manufacturer of the credit card sized computer Raspberry Pi . I find you are doing the business of embedded computers in your website,I guess you would have the interest in our products. Now we can provide you the latest version of Raspberry pi (type B+) with the competetive price and good service.and we serve several distributor in your country now.you can see that the companies in your country sell the Pi in their website .http://www.snapdeal.com/brand/raspberry-pi . If you have the interest in this products ,please kindly let me know.thank you Best Regards, David Well, I'm definitely not interested to re-sell Raspberry Pi, and far away from India, but out of the curiosity I asked about the pricing, the answer was immediately: Hi Tsvetan，

Thanks for your reply. For type B: USD 31 ， For type B+：USD 32 FCA HK ,Delivery time: 4~7 days. Please review the attached file for the difference between type B and type B+. Anything you wanna know ,please feel free to contact me. thank you. Best Regards, David

So company in HK is manufacturing and selling clones of Raspberry Pi -> so far about the closed source designs which prevent you from being copied 🙂

No matter if your design is OPEN or CLOSED this do not stop others to copy and clone your design, this is not rocket technology after all, if they have one of your boards they can de-solder all components, then strip the board layer by layer and copy it 1:1.

The real protection for Raspberry Pi was that Broadcom didn’t sell few years their chips to anyone else than the RPF, but with the recent announcement http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323198 Broadcom seems didn’t resist and start selling these chips to anyone with cash.

There is one more original design which I saw today again with Raspberry Pi based processor:

Board which run Linux but have no Ethernet connectivity and cost $30. To me at least seems that Raspberry Pi B+ for $5 more gives you +4 USB hosts and Ethernet to be a better deal. This probably try to compete with the recently announced Raspberry Module as have more sophisticated power supply.

There is an interesting discussion about this board on Raspberry Pi forum