The Raspberry Pi board is simply the first project undertaken by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The project is almost closed as they have brought a product to market and there are distributors that are willing to undertake manufacture under licence on their behalf.
The project will be complete once the Model A is in production.
The Foundation will then determine their next project which I'm guessing will have more UK institutional objectives.
The 'community' of early adopters will hopefully make the Raspberry Pi hardware (and its inevitable clones) to be considered as a 'mainstream' device.
That adds leverage to the argument that the device can be introduced to UK educational institutions.
This whole forum could simply be moved to Home ->Forum -> Project1 (Rasperry Pi) ->General Discussion etc.
The Foundation is NOT about being a hardware manufacturer. That was the just the first project. BMs need to recognise that the Foundation has goals which are not about the hardware, but making the hardware available was just the first step in their overall objectives.
I really hope that the early adopters do exciting things with the board, because then it will add a stimulus for the kids going through school to learn 'formal' IT and also have 'fun' with some of the crazy ideas that we've all been discussing over the past months.
We've all got different goals! The Foundation wants to promote IT in UK education; I want to use the device for personal projects and also have a cheap enough device to introduce computers to people that could never have envisaged being able to be part of a worldwide information community.
Others are looking to use the board in commercial environments where the current offerings are very expensive in comparison (kiosks; ATMs; Pub Games machines etc....)
Let's not forget, that peole put their houses on the line to get the first project completed and I feel a little ashamed about the way that we have 'ganged up' about being let down and being angered about not knowing what was going to happen.
At the end of the day, Farnell & RS would not have taken the product on board if they were not convinced that it would be commercially advantageous to them. They will simply make revenue from the discounts that they can obtain on sourcing components at much lower ciosts than the Foundation could and they seem to be reasonably fair in the way that they are treating the consumer demand.
Just take a deep breath and accept that you're going to have to wait a good few months more to get one of these boards. When you actually analyse everything, the announcement of 256Mb on the Model A was probably the most important of the day, but it sort of got lost in all the hype.
Just 12 years ago, I was Ops Manager for an Investment Bank and their main system was running on a VAX processor with 128Mb of RAM. The software and OS ran smoothly and over 100 users were accessing the system during the working day. To have this much processing capability on such a small footprint and at such a low entry price is amazing!