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Comment by MarcScott | Hacker News Reader

That was the original idea. However, as well as producing a board that was great for education and hobbyists, it turned out it was great for a whole range of applications, and the bulk orders started coming in from companies all over the world.

The Foundation is funded on the sales of Raspberry Pi hardware, government contracts and charitable donations. More sales directly benefit the charity. This allows us to:

- Run the world's largest network of coding clubs for children, for free.

- Produce educational resources for schools and clubs all over the world, for free.

- Conduct research into CS pedagogy.

- Provide Pi 400s and monitors to disadvantaged learners in England.

- Support educators all over the world with free physical and digital publications.

I know nothing about an IPO of RPTL, other than what I've read in the media, but I can guarantee you that RPF will continue to be a non-profit charity, and continue with it's mission.

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>> I know nothing about an IPO of RPTL, other than what I've read in the media, but I can guarantee you that RPF will continue to be a non-profit charity, and continue with it's mission.

Call me cynical, but you are absolutely clueless. Once shareholders are involved (especially public) the management will be changed. This lovely piece appeared about a week ago here on HN:

https://reactionwheel.net/2021/11/your-boards-of-directors-i...

The RPi founders will be sacked in favor of profits. All those charitable things done for free will be stopped. The $35 Pi - nobody will mind if we raise that to $50. All sorts of things will change. Maybe not immediately, but they will change. The profit motive goes directly against the notion of a "non-profit" organization. Shareholders want ROI. End of story, end of Pi as we know it.

I know of very few cases in which privatization of something publicly run has benefitted the public.

The argument "oh but the capital will allow all kinds of investments that will decrease the price in the long run" almost never holds up. Maybe it does in RPI's case, their innovation was supply chain based, after all. But my personal expectation, since a for profit company's interest is to extract as much profit add possible, is that RPI boards will move upmarket and become the premium option with an ecosystem advantage. Their position to do this is already quite good, they're basically already there. But the increased prices will also mean that companies operating on lower margins will become stronger - the Pine64s of the world.

That's the "bad case". The "good case" would be that they'll operate with low margins and compensate with scale and keep the educational stuff as marketing expenses. But that's hard to imagine.

I'm somewhat okay with either. Luckily the competition in the segment is healthy nowadays.

> I know of very few cases in which privatization of something publicly run has benefitted the public.

this has never been a "publicly" run company in the way you describe it. It has always been a private limited company.

The issue of concern here is that it is going from a private limited company where the shareholders are mostly to do with the rpi foundation, meaning that there is some chance that all the profit generated goes back to the foundation.

If its a public company, unless there are strict rules, it'll be open to shareholders buying control and changing the purpose of the trading company to something other than a tool to generate income for the foundation.

However thats not a given yet. I really hope that its something that is beneficial to the foundation.

I think we need to understand the ownership structure post IPO to understand what the future may hold.

If 100% of trading is going in the IPO then I think your predictions will be right on the money.

If the foundation retains the majority share and we're seeing 30/40% go to the IPO then it doesn't really matter how much profit the shareholders are demanding, the foundation can just continue to run things as it sees fit. Though the foundation may worry about the stock price tanking of course and still do what the shareholders demand.

> All those charitable things done for free will be stopped.

Are you kidding? They clashes might be free for kids, but they can get charity donations, governmental donations, and it’s essentially a “buy our product” class. It’s great value for minor expense.

Can you go into more detail on how the Foundation and the company are separated?

I see a lot of doubt in this thread, and while some of it seems to come from a confusion of the two entities, the rest seems to acknowledge their separation, but doubt that it will protect the foundation in the long run.

So, what would interest me would be how funding & staffing of the foundation works, if there are arrangements to ensure access to low-price material for the activities you list and such.

Edit: a link to an FAQ or such will do just nicely of course ;)

the article says that the Foundation owns the Company. Wonder how that changes when the company IPOs... maybe the Foundation retains majority ownership?

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation, formed in 2009, is a registered charity with a goal of putting “the power of computing and digital making into the hands of people all over the world.” The famous eponymous SBC was designed to be affordable and champion programming in schools, hoping to repeat the home computer boom of the 1980s. Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary responsible for the engineering and trading operations of the foundation."

> I see a lot of doubt in this thread, and while some of it seems to come from a confusion of the two entities, the rest seems to acknowledge their separation, but doubt that it will protect the foundation in the long run.

There are two[1] companies registered, the foundation, which is the oldest, and the trading company.

From what I can see the foundation appear to get a significant portion of the profits from the trading company: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

so long as that continues, then everything will be fine.

This setup can be used for good or bad. It can be used to for getting subsidies, it can also be used to funnel money from the non-profit to the for-profit, or to put everything which is for-profit on the for-profit, or to market itself non-profit while the main thing is the for-profit. There's examples of each of these, but I don't know whether it would apply here.

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