This situation and their responses are so bizarre that I have to wonder if there’s something we’re missing. Even the way they make a fuss about the true name of the legal entity is so weird.

It took me a while to grok the situation solely because of how bizarre the pushback from platform.io people is.

I understand (but would still be vupset) if rpi org was disallowing this on the grounds of commercial reasons, not the other way around.

But this is just on a whole another level.

Maintainers are well within their rights to say "Fork it" if your vision of the product isn't theirs, or it would add time to their releases, or for no reason at all. One of my favorite examples is https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/04/i-would-like-debian-to-stop... . Supporting a platform is expensive in time and mental energy. PlatformIO is under no requirement to do so.

From what I can gather, PlatformIO is not willing to fund future development on RPI themselves, and reached out to the much better capitalized RPI foundation to try to get funding. They may or may not have been assholes in how they did that, we'll probably never know. Asking wasn't insane, rejecting the patch isn't... Insane per se, even if it's probably shooting themselves in the foot by denying themselves a huge customer base. Their communication has been poor as heck, though.

I am intentionally not warning about JWZs policy on links from HN, because it's funny to me.

I think if they had approached this with “we can’t maintain this platform without sponsorship” and solicited it from that from the requester and the general public and behind the scenes contacted the company to inquire about interest it wouldn’t have come off so oddly.

PlatformIO believes devs cannot live without them, so they can rule the world and tax others. RPi rightfully show a finger, that was very kind, they could ask for money from PlatformIO for support.

You left out an important detail: Project C is going to have to _support_ your "free" code in their product. If it breaks, even if not because of anything Project C did, their paying customers are going to demand work from THEM.

    if i want the prestige of my code being in their project

LOL yeah that's definitely why this contribution is happening /s

> If it breaks, even if not because of anything Project C did, their paying customers are going to demand work from THEM.

Well... isn't that what their customers are paying them for?

Exactly. If PlatformIO had enough paying customers who needed support for this chip, they would probably want to add support for it themselves.

It's the non-paying "customers" who are the problem here, expecting PlatformIO to grow in ways that the core team sees as unsustainable.

Then they should take their beef to “person A”, not to me. My example properly captures my noninvolvement. Just like in TFA, RPi was not involved. Someone else made the patch, then PlatformIO demanded money from RPi