A host of developers and free souls used to use Raspberry Pi for non-mainstream purposes, the kind of chaps generally not in love with Microsoft. And as just recently found out, the Raspberries are looking up no other servers for updates than Microsoft’s.

The reason is, according to the Raspberry officials is that the Visual Studio code repo is needed for enhanced user experience.

While this reasoning surely accepted by some, but most non-enterprise users are now having the creeps, because of their uses of the Raspberry Pi. Anyone ever into actually purchasing a Raspberry Pi knows very well that the outlying reason to do so is to try out some funky coding and use that really requires no public or enterprise knowledge.

And the definite no-no is to visit Microsoft to share knowledge.

The lack of any forewarning or communication beforehand questions the motives behind the move and if it wasn’t for a haphazard discovery of a Microsoft PGP key probably lots of Cinderellas would have slept longer.

Those who never owned or used a Raspberry Pi might think otherwise, but Microsoft telemetry in the Linux community is known as a bad juju.

Especially after looking into the surprise package.

What there was to be found is that a gate opened wide for any Microsoft-driven software update, initiated after an apt-get update.

Coupled with the official Raspberry Pi forums admins quickly locking down and deleting the topic threads, it smells like betrayal for many, and rightly so.

One of the key ingredients of Raspberry successis privacy. Or it was, because If you or any family members logged into the MS ecosystem such as Github, Bing, Office/Live, they now identify and track you when using same shared public IP at home.

Welcome to the brave new world, where many will tumble in front of the altars of the big money enterprise. And eventually you will have to chooseeventually you will have to choose: are you independent or are you a subscriber.