The makers of the Raspberry Pi credit card-sized computer today announced every last piece of code running on the computer’s ARM chip has been open sourced. While the computer could already run several Linux-based operating systems, not all the drivers were open source. Going fully open source prevents users from having to use drivers that are proprietary or reverse-engineered, and it should make it easier to create new Raspberry Pi-targeted OS ports.

The announcement said all the VideoCore driver code has been made available on GitHub under the 3-clause BSD license, making the Pi’s BCM2835 chip “the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers.” As of today, “everything running on the ARM is now open source.” (UPDATE: As some astute readers note, this isn't strictly true; see the Editor's Pick comments for more details.)

“Broadcom is the first vendor to open their mobile GPU drivers up in this way,” wrote Raspberry Pi Foundation lead Linux developer Alex Bradbury. “We at the Raspberry Pi Foundation hope to see others follow.”

The additional open source code will also make it easier for new operating system ports to take advantage of the Pi’s full hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities. Bradbury specifically mentioned progress in bringing FreeBSD, NetBSD, Plan9, RISC OS, Haiku, and other operating systems to the Pi.

"Aside from being exciting to FOSS enthusiasts for philosophical reasons, it’s also going to make it much easier for third party developers to (for instance) implement Wayland EGL client and EGL server support, or to provide better integration of GLES/VG with X.Org," Bradbury wrote.