They are both. There is a non profit foundation which funds the educational side and the main company which operates for a profit. I suspect the bulk of their revenue comes from the industrial side of things where the Pi makes a much better base than a lot of the half assed hacked together SBC's out in the market.

There have certainly been mis-steps asking the way but all in all I consider the Pi to be a British success story. I guess it remains to be seen how much of the valuation goes to the founders and employees and how much is invested into their next phase of growth.

I was interested in an Amstrad HiFi for retro reasons and tumbled down the rabbit hole. Alan Sugar conned an entire country.

There are lots of SBCs out there but the difference really comes down to documentation and how upstreamable everything is. The Pi might not be perfect but it's a much more reliable design to build something with than many of the other options.

But what are the other options that aren’t from some random Chinese company? I tried a Beaglebone but it was so slow at a similar price point.

On one hand, I’m a fan of the ESP32 as a challenge.

OTOH, sometimes you actually need a full fledged computer for your semi embedded task, and sometimes you just don’t want to (or can’t be seen to, from PR standpoint) support Beijing.

While arguments can be made either way about the prior para, from a biz POV, it’s pretty binary.

Would love to find similar platforms that don’t involve those concerns and might theoretically be commercializable by hackers, but I’m not aware of many.