This device has nothing to do with Broadcom.
Eh? The Raspberry Pi Foundation is really just the PR arm of Broadcom, with Eben Upton the glue. (Not legally, sure, but in every other way.)
I've been following the Pi since before it was released, and to me it seems the truth is somewhere in the middle.
The relationship offers different things to each of the partner, and seems to achieve both of their goals.
The only people who a freeloaders seem to be the semi-professionals, who get the platform but give little to the wider ecosystem, then moan that the can't order in quantity and that broadcom doesn't offer technical support for free...
Who are you referring to? The Pi folks themselves are very loathe to interact with FOSS developers, and instead just grab whatever they use. Isn't that exactly "getting the platform but giv[ing] little to the wider ecosystem"?
It's not like they provide basically anything back to Debian, despite their "Raspberry Pi OS" being derived from Debian, for example.
The use of the RaspPi in commercial or semi-commercial products isn't of much interest to them, they are quite open that they would prefer to sell them such that they not only make money for Raspberry Pi, but also work towards the Foundation's aims. I can't blame them for that.
The original Raspberry Pi was the Raspberry Pi Foundation's attempt at a "Saved pocket Money/Birthday gift" computer, aimed at allowing keen people to experience and learn more of Computer Technology outside of the "This is Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Email on Windows XP" world of the school IT curriculum in the early-to-mid 2000s.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity, with the aim of:
The object of the charity is to further the advancement of education of adults and children, particularly in the field of Computers, Computer Science and related subjects
As a charity, I understand it is would be legally questionable if they were to donate their money or resources to others that is not directly supporting their efforts as a charity (e.g sponsoring the Debian project) - that's not how charities work.
And they are under no obligation to do so either. After all, aren't the freedoms of Free Software Definition:
Freedom 0 - the freedom to use the work
Freedom 1 - the freedom to study the work
Freedom 2 - the freedom to copy and share the work with others
Freedom 3 - the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works
An the GPU even includes such phases as:
freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish).
The Pi foundation are doing
exactly what Free Software is about. It is what authors sign up for when they give their code that license.
Now some might not like that they Pi's design isn't fully open (e.g. binary firmware blobs, no schematics) but the Pi never pretended to be an "open platform" nirvana, just a platform you could run software on, that a computer-mad kid could buy using pocket money.
I also think many do not know that a prototype for the Pi was an ATmega644 with 512K SRAM - it wasn't an Broadcom conspiracy from day 0, it was a case of the right people in the right place at the right time.