Ask Electronics

Truly open tools? As far as I remember, arm is supported in gcc. Even RISC-V is being supported now. You can make a lot of the tooling yourself for uploading or use the already existing one. But guess which is less time consuming? If someone has already did the job for you, why reinvent the wheel? You also have openocd and even black magic probe for debugging. Tons of open source framework and stack available (zephyr rtos, free rtos, arduino, mbed, opencm, cmsis). You want to design a board? KiCAD. Making an enclosure? FreeCAD and 3D printing does the job. What more openness could you possibly want? As for the point of easier access, why would you be bitter when datasheet, sdk, and other tooling are available online? Are you mad that you didn't have access to those when you were younger? And about an ecosystem designed to make a profit, of course ic/chip/mcu manufacturers will make a profit. Do you expect to get them for free? And if you don't like a certain manufacturer, then don't use their product when designing. You can totally pair an STMicroelectronics MEMS microphone with ADC from Texas Instrument, and MCU from Espressif. Unless of course that very specific hardware is not provided by any other manufacturer, in which case that makes the point even moot because that is not the fault of the engineer.