He admits that Open Source development model creates a very valuable resource of free engineering. “You won’t believe the really valuable things people have done. A couple of months ago we got an email from a guy who said pull this 5 lines patch and the SD card performance will double!  There are things like that so it’s a source of very valuable engineering effort.”

Engagement with community, said Upton, also gives them good ideas about where they should be spending their efforts.

Upton noted that they don’t want to pick winner or to have a fix idea of what people should be doing with the Pi. They keep an eye on what the community is doing with the Pi and then intervene to help the community.

“We look for places where we could do little intervention; where we can go in and spend 10,000-20,000  dollars on a piece of engineering which will enable the community  forward. Most recently, obviously, we have been doing this with Xbox Media Center,” said Upton.

Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, and Eben Upton in a classroom of local kids.

The innovation around Raspberry Pi is not limited to individual engineers or developers, even companies like Google are investing resources in it to make the platform more useful for users. Google recently announced a tool called Coder which turns any Raspberry Pi into a web server.

“I think the Google coder example is quite fantastic as I didn’t know anything about it until the announcement came out. I think there were people from the foundation speaking to Google about it I was as surprised as anyone else,” said Upton.

He admitted that it was a learning experience for him as it made him realized that Raspberry Pi has now become a large enough organization that he doesn’t know everything that’s going on inside the organization.

How is Raspberry Pi funded?

There is one more piece in the jigsaw puzzle of Raspberry Pi that I needed to understand. We have seen how much larger companies like Canonical failed to raise funds for Ubuntu Edge project and the hardware never made it to the market. I am well aware of the efforts KDE’s Aaron Seigo is making to bring a KDE powered tablet Vivaldi (earlier Spark) to the market. Though he did not chose the same route as Canonical did but he was keeping a close eye at the campaign for obvious reasons. Interestingly the Raspberry Pi foundation did not chose the convention path of raising funds.

So how are they funding the unit and other related costs?

“The interesting thing about the Raspberry Pi foundation is that we are largely funding by our own profits that we make from selling Pi units. Unlike most charities we really don’t do fund raising – the conventional fund raising,” said Upton.

The foundation was lucky as Google showed interest in the project. “At the start of the year Google UK offered us million dollars of funding specifically to put Pis in the hands of students and children of United Kingdom and Ireland,” said Upton.

Under this Google funding the foundation will be shipping over 15,000 to 16,000 Raspberry Pi kits to children in the UK. These kits include the board, the power supply and the SD card. Since the foundation itself is very small they don’t handle the shipment themselves, they have over 5-6 partners including  CoderDojo, Code Club and OCR (one of the examination boards of the UK). The foundation delivers the Pis to these partners and these organizations are responsible for identifying the children who they think would benefit from the Pis in their bedroom.

Google is doing something similar with the kids in Japan. The company is giving away over 5,000 Raspberry Pi kits to students in Tokyo. These kind of efforts shows just how important Pi has become as a tool to teach computing to children.