Towards a more collaborative OSS model

No more abandoned OSS projects

A few days ago I started (and finished) working on my latest hardware project, which I call “Home”. If you’ve ever worked with MicroPython, which this project uses, you may have come across mpfshell, an extremely useful utility which makes managing the program on the microcontroller very easy.

I use mpfshell for my projects, and I wanted to upload compiled scripts to the microcontroller, but mpfshell did not do this natively. “No matter”, I thought, I will just write the feature and issue a pull request to the original developer, who can then incorporate it into the main program. I went to GitHub to see if something similar was already under way, but I saw the project in a semi-abandoned state, with issues and pull requests piling up and receiving no response.

This prompted me to think about a pervasive problem in open source, which I want to discuss here and offer a solution

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