The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK charity, with the aim of:
I see, they are exempt from being a contributor to the software ecosystem they exploit, because one government has decided they are a charity.
Right. Only human individuals can be "freeloaders" (your term, not mine).
Like I said, I don't really care. It is
you who brought it up:
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...
My point is that that is exactly what the Raspberry Pi Foundation itself is doing.
Perhaps you should examine why you feel so strongly that being a company or a charity is sufficient to deflect any criticism of their behaviour?
I repeat, I am not the one claiming there are freeloaders. You did that yourself. I know and understand various licenses, and use a lot of them for my own work (from Creative Commons to GPL to proprietary licensing). I don't think anyone is being a "freeloader", not even the semi-professional people you mentioned, nor the Pi Foundation. What I don't like, is when people like you spend a lot of effort in using arbitrary definitions and positions (of being Important Commercial Company, or Good Charity I Swear) as shields against criticism of observed behaviour.
All I have done here, is claim that 1) The Raspberry Pi Foundation is hostile to FOSS developers, including to developers whose work they rely on in the "products" they provide, that 2) The Raspberry Pi Foundation is in real life a PR arm of Broadcom (in legal-speak, supported by Broadcom and University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory), and that 3) because of their history with their hardware products, I would be surprised if the Pico did not have similar hardware faults as previous Pi products.
(I am more than a bit angry, because a lot of Raspberry Pi users believe Linux/FOSS is at the root of the hardware/software problems. This is incorrect; the Pi hardware is utter crap compared to say Samsung Exynos or Amlogic Meson based Linux SBCs.)
I mock them, and their hardware, because that hostility is unworkable in the long term. It is damaging, because it leads to actions like RedHat did to counter Oracle's (license-abiding) exploitation, which leads to general losses to the entire community. It is also completely unreasonable, and seems to stem from Broadcom corporate culture and Eben Upton's personal dislike of everything FOSS.
I really wish they'd picked FreeBSD instead of Linux. It would have fit their model and culture much better.