[PragmaticPulp]

Comment from Eben Upton of the Raspberry Pi foundation:

> We received a proposal from PlatformIO Labs in October 2022. While we absolutely empathise with the challenges of funding open-source projects, we were unable to justify paying the very substantial recurring fees involved. We indicated that we would not be proceeding, and have subsequently made some investments elsewhere

What am I missing here? Is PlatformIO rejecting this contribution from a community member (not a Raspberry Pi employee AFAICT) unless the Raspberry Pi foundation agrees to pay them substantial recurring fees?

I understand PlatformIO is a business, but it’s bizarre to see them trying to extract fees from a company that doesn’t appear to be involved in this open source work.

Am I missing something?

The PlatformIO team’s responses all feel like they were written by a team of lawyers and PR people, or at least someone trying to pretend to be a team of lawyers and PR people. I don’t entirely understand what’s going on with this whole situation but from what I’ve seen I think I’ll steer clear of PlatformIO in the future.

[clnq]

I don’t know about the quality of this PR, it looks good at first glance. But sometimes “free” things have significant costs. For example, a project offering a RPi integration will probably have to maintain it and further develop it, or face significant pressure to do so. And if they don’t see that it will be worth it, maybe it won’t. They know their customers and business better than we do.

I have seen this plenty of times in my part of tech (AAA games). People often approach companies asking to integrate their code into games, like FPS unlockers or even entire multiplayer mods. But even if the code and the ideas are offered for free, it will cost significant resources to dedicate team members to porting the work, further developing it until it meets quality standards, certifying an update, pushing it out, and then maintaining it. There are a few dozen of these small costs that add up.

Integration is easier in open source. But not maintenance and further development until the feature meets reasonable expectations. And you can’t really ask anyone who does a PR to maintain the code forever either.

[PragmaticPulp]

> For example, a project offering a RPi integration will probably have to maintain it and further develop it, or face significant pressure to do so. And if they don’t see that it will be worth it, maybe it won’t. They know their customers and business better than we do.

This is genetically true, but it should be noted that PlatformIO already has integrated the RaspberryPi platform and maintains code for it: For example, a project offering a RPi integration will probably have to maintain it and further develop it, or face significant pressure to do so. And if they don’t see that it will be worth it, maybe it won’t. They know their customers and business better than we do.

https://registry.platformio.org/platforms/platformio/raspber...

This PR appears to be a specific API improvement that a lot of people in the community have been using and maintaining.

In parallel, PlatformIO appears to have tried to get recurring fees from RaspberryPi after they implemented support for it. The Raspberry Pi foundation declined to pay, and now PlatformIO is refusing to accept these contributions from the open source community, citing the way Raspberry Pi has declined to pay their substantial recurring fees.

I get that it’s a commercial product and they’re not obligated to accept anything they don’t want to. However, rolling out support for a platform and then refusing community engagement with quality PRs on the basis that they couldn’t extract recurring fees from the vendor is rather uncool.

Just as it’s not fair to expect this company to maintain PRs forever, it’s not fair for this company to expect the Raspberry Pi foundation to enter into recurring fee payments forever so this company can add a community-generated feature to their commercial product.

> it will cost significant resources to dedicate team members to porting the work, further developing it until it meets quality standards

I understand what you’re saying, but that doesn’t not appear to be the case here. This appears to be a popular and well-tested form in use and in ongoing development by an active community. It’s also for a platform that PlatformIO already supports. They’re saying they don’t want to work with the community on this because the vendor (who is unrelated to this entire debacle) won’t enter into a contract to pay them recurring fees for it.

[clnq]

It's possible they've made some blanket business decision like "we will not support any more third party integration code unless they finance it". It's a somewhat reasonable stance, overall. But some companies use PR speak as a facade and don't communicate these internal stances clearly to their stakeholders.

[ikravets]

Sorry for the late response, it was a night in Ukraine. A lot of negative comments here without a deep understating of the real issue.

Please read my detailed explanation in the original PR https://github.com/platformio/platform-raspberrypi/pull/36#i...

[mmastrac]

I understand the challenge of funding open-source projects, but it seems like a bad idea to turn down a high-quality contribution because you cannot agree with RPi on a fee schedule.

As one of the comments on GitHub suggests, why not accept the PR and let the community maintain it? Otherwise it feels like this is not an open-source project -- just source-available.