Raspberry Pi display drivers go fully open-source

24.10.2012
The Raspberry Pi Foundation announced Wednesday that the Broadcom display hardware used in its flagship Raspberry Pi system board is now the first ARM-based system-on-a-chip to use open-source drivers provided entirely by the vendor.

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What this means, as a matter of practicality, is that developers will have an easier time translating popular open-source software into versions for the Raspberry Pi. The source code is now available at a new .

"We've been excitedly following the progress of FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, RISC OS, Haiku and others. All these projects could now potentially port these libraries and make use of the full hardware accelerated graphics facilities of the Raspberry Pi," wrote the foundation's lead developer, Alex Bradbury, in an official blog post.

Bradbury also thanked Broadcom "for being the first vendor to take this step forward," characterizing the move as an important one for embedded Linux as a community.

Even some of the most notable open-source projects contain some proprietary code. One example is Google's mobile OS - while the operating system itself is open, some of Google's own apps are proprietary, as are the hardware drivers used on stock devices.