jamesh wrote: ↑Fri Oct 12, 2018 2:31 pm
Indeed. It always amazes me how virulent some poeople can be about what is, in effect, a charity project aimed at teaching children. Yes, things have broadended out to cover a lot more than education, but education is where all the money goes.
In recent years I have recommended the Pi to students as an affordable way to run Mathematica at home. In my opinion shutting off the license at midterm without warning was not the right things to do. As I've stated before, the inclusion of a free version of Mathematica has been an essential differentiator between the Raspberry Pi and other Pi-like single board computers. In my opinion, any surprise loss of product functionality has the potential to break an essential trust relationship with a vendor. Such things can also cause people who had previously supported purchase of Pi computers in education to look foolish and lose credibility.
I suspect the increasing capability of recent models of Pi to run Mathematica plays a role in the difficulty of renewing the free license included with the Pi. Perhaps that license started to compete with individual sales of $100 student licenses for Intel-compatible machines. New Pi hardware under development would likely make this situation even worse.
If Wolfram won't relicense the Raspberry Pi, maybe their competitor Maple will. Note that teachers and students where I work actually prefer Maple to Mathematica. Alternatively, availability of a $10 personal license for the Pi would be better than nothing. As it stands, the current situation is disappointing.