I would have preferred they sold directly. It is not so much the logistics, but that they have lost control. And lets not pretend that these companies are doing it for love-- they are taking money that could have gone to the charity.
On the launch they had no idea one of the retailers was only going to take a statement of interest. I'm still not sure what's going on at RS.
The servers were woefully under-prepared-- if the Pi folks were running it they could have thrown it up on AWS for an hour and then thrown up a static 'sold out' page. No faffing around, no attempting to register on a server that was being DDOSed.
This announcement shows they don't seem to have control of their pricing either. It's not the end of the world, but this seems like something they should be in control of.
As for the logistics side, I don't actually see why they couldn't have handled it themselves. They already had a payment processor set up for badge sales. I'm pretty sure 10,000 rPi's, 10,000 padded envelopes, and a printer could easily fit in almost any room. So all they would have to do is sort things out with a shipping agent, and hire a few people to pack them. IIRC, Amazon offer this service (send them boxes of something and they'll distribute it) so they could have even avoided this and still retained more control.
On the launch they had no idea one of the retailers was only going to take a statement of interest. I'm still not sure what's going on at RS.
The servers were woefully under-prepared-- if the Pi folks were running it they could have thrown it up on AWS for an hour and then thrown up a static 'sold out' page. No faffing around, no attempting to register on a server that was being DDOSed.
This announcement shows they don't seem to have control of their pricing either. It's not the end of the world, but this seems like something they should be in control of.
As for the logistics side, I don't actually see why they couldn't have handled it themselves. They already had a payment processor set up for badge sales. I'm pretty sure 10,000 rPi's, 10,000 padded envelopes, and a printer could easily fit in almost any room. So all they would have to do is sort things out with a shipping agent, and hire a few people to pack them. IIRC, Amazon offer this service (send them boxes of something and they'll distribute it) so they could have even avoided this and still retained more control.