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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

It seems like Espressif are in the same situation as Pi w/r/t PlatformIO[1]. As an outsider, it sounds like PlatformIO was trying to extract a very large annual payment from RPi and Espressif, and that was after the initial support was added in, and some of the community started adopting it.

It's a weird situation, but I think PlatformIO built up a dominant position by supporting all these platforms and accepting community contributions to do so, then tried extracting value from the manufacturers directly after the fact, blocking further community PRs that would add new board revisions or fix bugs. See related: [2]

[1] https://github.com/platformio/platform-espressif32/issues/12...

[2] https://github.com/platformio/platform-raspberrypi/pull/36

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Thanks for all of your rational contributions to those many threads, Jeff.

It is an extremely weird situation, and a deeply bad look. If I was pressed for an opinion, I would say that I wish Eben had taken the high road and gone all in on supporting PIO despite the tangy mystery aftertaste for the simple reason that it would be a net-positive for developers.

The way things stand, migrating away from the Arduino IDE to using VSCode with RP2040 feels like you're being actively messed with; there's so many projects and forum posts that sound like the right path, when it seems like the actual answer should be super simple. This is super painful for newcomers.

Can you provide a TLDR to what the state of things are? I was under the impression that ESPHome was built on top of PlatformIO so this sounds scary...

> It is an extremely weird situation, and a deeply bad look

I never followed all the ins and outs but from having a quick look through the comments on https://github.com/platformio/platform-raspberrypi/pull/36 the following happened:

  - Developer independent of RPi opens PR to add RP2040 support to PlatformIO

  - PlatformIO don't want to merge it, expecting some financial contribution to help maintain the support (seems reasonable)

  - They discuss this with RPi, ultimately RPi don't want to pay the asked contributions so that PlatformIO are happy maintaining support (this also seems reasonable)

  - End result is no RP2040 support in PlatformIO

Ultimately maintaining things isn't free. RPi have chosen the development environment(s) they wish to support and it hasn't included PlatformIO. What's weird or a bad look?

> Ultimately maintaining things isn't free.

This is a hypocritical stance for any project that accepts free contributions from the public. Besides rent-seeking, what reason could justify preventing the community from maintaining features/microcontrollers that the organization is unwilling to (due to costs)?

> Besides rent-seeking, what reason could justify preventing the community from maintaining features/microcontrollers that the organization is unwilling to (due to costs)?

Platformio I suspect.

The problem (to me) is that they welcomed that PR and requested corrections until it was in a good enough shape to be accepted, without any indication that it wouldn't be accepted unless/until they had financial support from RPi. That only became clear almost a year after the PR was opened.

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