[userbinator]

but it probably did more to promote STM32s as a learning platform than anything that ST did in that time period.

...and thus drive further product sales in the future. If you think about it, sales of development hardware are not going to be frequent nor recurring, while sales of the actual product dominate their profits.

I'm personally glad that companies are starting to see the advantages of freely available documentation and cheap development hardware, and the days of 4/5-figure development boards with secret NDA documentation are slowing passing; ST was (and in some ways still is) one of the notoriously closed ones.