[easygenes]

PlatformIO seems to be seeking a support and sponsorship agreement with Raspberry Pi.

The integration of the community-supported core Arduino-Pico that's enabled by this PR would indeed be a significant upgrade to the existing core. It seems that this core now has broad community support with nearly 100 contributors, and the burden of continuing integration after merging this PR would be minimal.

PlatformIO appears to be using the support burden as a shield for defending their shady tactics of withholding approval (and indeed completely ghosting the entire community after repeated attempts for further comment on the PR for over half a year) of this highly wished for community-derived PR while they quietly attempted to woo Raspberry Pi Trading into a support contract last year.

The situation is now complicated by the fact that representatives of Raspberry Pi (perhaps Eben Upton himself) privately contacted the maintainer of this PR recently attempting to urge that it get merged. This feels like a surreptitious attempt to benefit from PlatformIO's work while avoiding the support agreement that similar vendors such as Espressif and SiFive appear to have entered into with PlatformIO.

Edit: This based on the summary comment here - https://github.com/platformio/platform-raspberrypi/pull/36#i...