One of the saner reasons for this structure is that the non-profit owns the things the for-profit works on. If the for-profit goes under, all things are still owned by the non-profit, so some large tech company can't swoop in and yoink anything available.
This includes any and all data generated by the for-profit, which means your data is "safe".
There are two separate entities: the raspberry pi foundation which is the charity and unchanged, and the raspberries pi holdings company which has always been the business side of the project. The corporation contributes to the foundation a significant amount of money which is not changing. The charity is the majority stakeholder in the company.
In general the reasons could be, an opportunity to raise capital meaning they can ramp up production or produce a better product, and/or the current owners want to cash out.
Introduced in 2014, the Pi gained the familiar 40-pin GPIO header and 512MB of RAM, yet it can hardly be called a ball of fire when compared to more modern hardware from the company.
Pi supremo Eben Upton was delighted with how things have gone so far and said in a statement: "The reaction that we have received is a reflection of the world-class team that we have assembled and the strength of the loyal community with whom we have grown.
"Welcoming new shareholders alongside our existing ones brings with it a great responsibility, and one that we accept willingly, as we continue on our mission to make high-performance, low-cost computing accessible to everyone."
Some users have expressed mixed feelings about the IPO, noting that the money would be helpful for R&D and new projects, however, the flotation underlines the fact that the company is a business.
As for the future, Upton told The Register earlier this year that while he remains at the helm of the organization, it would continue to do interesting work and try to keep making money.
The Reg hopes this is the case, but think it's fair to say that pleasing both the corporation's customers and shareholders might end up being more challenging than obtaining a Raspberry Pi 5 at launch.
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Also state owned is only really useful for infrastructure, where it doesn't make sense to have multiple providers and monopolies are easily attainable. Like roads, rails, electricity, internet backbone infrastructure and providers, social media, etc. Democracy is the currently best way we know of managing monopolies.
For other stuff, you probably want employee owned democratic collectives. You would still have competition on the market, but its ordinary people that have the say. This would give more power to the people enthused about the tech and long term success, then all the short term gains.
The 3B was a far superior alternative to the NES Classic I couldn't get at the time (and taught me what little I know about Linux - I even got a lesson in sudo one time when a command wouldn't work). o7
