The Raspberry Pi Foundation oversees design, production, sales, marketing and all other operations related to the Raspberry Pi device. The Organization is a registered charity in the United Kingdom with several subsidiaries world wide. There is a Wikipedia article on The Organization. In 2018, The Organization had income in excess of £31M (~$40M USD), a staff of over 130 people, a board of trustees, and a rather complex organizational structure:
In early 2013 the organization split into two parts: Raspberry Pi Foundation, which is responsible for the charitable and educational activities; and Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd, responsible for the engineering and trading activities.13 Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raspberry Pi Foundation, with the money earned from sales of Raspberry Pi products being used to fund the charitable work of the Foundation. Eben Upton was initially CEO of both divisions, but in September 2013 Lance Howarth became CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, with Eben Upton remaining as CEO of Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd. Philip Colligan took over from Lance Howarth as CEO of Raspberry Pi Foundation in July 2015.1415
More information on The Organizationis available on the UK's Charity Commission website. Here you can see some details on how much of their revenue goes to "Charitable activities", and numbers of Employees with total benefits over £60,000. By comparison, here's the picture for another UK charity: SUSTRANS
I am not an accountant, but the Raspberry Pi Organization is quite a charity to my way of thinking. And speaking of "charity", The Organization spends less than 11% of its Expenditures on "Charitable Activities" (ref). As an uninformed question, I wonder if the charity angle is more about avoiding UK taxes?
But I don't care much about that - taxation is a matter for the citizens of the UK and their government. What I do care about is the paucity of hardware specifications The Organization has published. The Organization has stated the purpose of the Raspberry Pi development is, "to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing." Hmmm... OK, but I do not understand how that stated purpose is best served by withholding hardware documentation from its users. I think this smacks of self-serving insincerity - Broadcom's IP ownership notwithstanding.
From an answer to a question on the Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange site:
You may have noticed that I used the term "It's my understanding ..." in my answer. You may not be aware of this, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a UK "charity", does not publish specifications or schematics for the GPIO - nor in fact for much of the hardware. If it strikes you as odd that a charity would produce and promote the RPi to hobbyists as a "learning device", and then withhold most of the hardware technical details as proprietary, then welcome to the club!
The fallout from The Foundation's paucity of hardware documentation is that "the community" has been motivated to conjur the missing specifications and details from observation, experimentation, comparison and yes, some speculation and guesswork. The GPIO Electrical Specifications is one source of information and documentation, there's also this on GitHub, and there's the Everything You Wanted to Know About GPIO But Were Afraid to Ask website. You may refer to these sources for the missing hardware documentation on Raspberry Pi.
Unlike most of the rest of the recipes in this repo, this one is subjective and based on opinion - my opinion. That said, I do like the idea of being open-minded, and so would welcome your opinion. If you're motivated to do so, please open an Issue to share your comment(s).