"What would kill me, what would absolutely break my heart, is if somebody came along and killed the Pi with a closed platform system."

For Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, closed platforms are the root cause of a major skills shortage that's paralysing the UK computer programming industry. A closed platform Pi rival would kill everything his charity is hoping to achieve.

"It's no secret that the country has a severe shortage of programmers," the 34-year-old Cambridge graduate tells Wired.co.uk. "The 80s saw an ecosystem of microcomputers go away and become replaced by games consoles and PCs -- and at the same time, we saw a reduction in the number of kids participating in programming and computer engineering. We're already in a bad place, and if we're not careful, it could get even worse."

Our conversation on 18 October provided Upton with a chance to rehearse the major points of a lecture for "young professionals" he was giving that night at the Institute of Engineering and Technology. His passion to find a solution to the skills shortage is still as strong as it was when he established the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2009.

"I'm concerned that we're very happy to see computers increasingly becoming appliances in sealed boxes -- systems that you can only use to consume, not produce. To some extent there'll always be more people consuming than producing, but I think it's important to call out that the world doesn't have to be like that. There's this risk that we'll arrive in the "post-PC era" without a cheap commodity open platform, and that's just going to entrench all of the skills problems that we've started to see."

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched its own version of that gap-filling cheap commodity; a credit card-sized, exposed circuit, open system programming computer that has received praise from both the hobbyist and education sectors. Creating the platform was not as easy as the proverbial, however.

"During the development phase the biggest issues were always about cost," recalls Upton. "We started with a price and we wanted to know what we could build for it, which was a big challenge. We had to develop a relationship with the suppliers despite the fact that we were imagining buying very small numbers of components: we'd go to a chip supplier and say 'we only want to buy 10,000 chips' -- that's a tough sell. You're either going to get charged a lot of money or you're not even going to get a chance to buy them."

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is now in its second year of mass production; 400,000 units have shipped so far, and Upton has only just started to see his pocket programmer enter into the UK's schools en mass: "At the end of the last term the Pi was available in 'ones' with a very long lead time. Now you can go out and buy ten and get them with a very quick turn around, so teachers and pupils can actually get on and experiment in classes. We're only actually five or six weeks into the experience of trying to do Pi in schools. It's only being done by very advantaged schools, and by teachers who have a personal passion for bringing programming to kids. That said, the first bits of feedback that are coming back from that are very positive."

An unexpected spin-off the Foundation has been informed of is the way in which the Pi is bringing some parents and children closer together. Upton fondly recounts several stories he's heard of computer engineers using the Pi as a device to show their children what they do at work, as no previous platform had let them engage in quite the same way.

"The kind of chunky, clunky, bare board, get-going-with-it feel of the Pi seems to appeal to children," says Upton, trying to put a finger on the success of his stripped-down computer. "It's a bit more interesting than dad sitting you down in front of the PC and saying 'lets learn to write a program in Python'. It's a case of 'here's a cool thing which is very different from anything you've seen before, let's write a program on this'. It's exactly the same activity, but because it's framed in a way that doesn't tie it to the general experience of using the PC as a consumer device, it somehow seems to resonate with kids. That's really nice."

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