When week ago Dominic Clifton replaced all Cleanflight source code with Betaflight, I've written than Cleanflight is dead. Few people agreed, few (including Dominic himself) stated that it was a good idea. Main argument was that Cleanflight needed F4/F7, Dshot, CMS support and so on. Yes, CF needed that. This is true. In theory, with that one move Cleanflight got everything what it need. But also lost all it's uniqueness. Further narration wast that all those things that only CF had will be readded on top of Betaflight code.

One week later I repeat: that was a bad move and here are my arguments:

  • All Open Source projects exists only thanks to The Community. The bigger the community, the better. I did not participated in Cleanflight development much. Only few really minor pull request. I joined the hobby too late. Many developers worked on CF code for months, maybe even years. Not only Dominic. If someones arbitrary decission would just "erase" my contribution (in both code and know-how) I would be pretty pissed off. Really, there was a reason all those people participated in CF. Now, all their work that was not present in Betaflight, is gone. That is not encouraging.
  • The same goes for 3rd party apps like EZ-GUI. All of them lost CF compatibility over the night. Will they be willing to adopt to the changes?
  • I'm really not sure is reimplementation of Cleanflight specific features on top new code will be simple enough to be done in reasonable period of time
  • The biggest programming problem I see are resources. Betaflight is in very comfortable situation: it, more less, can ignore the fact that servo and motor outputs can not share the same timers. After all, who uses servos on mini quads? And CF is (was) not only about mini quads. What about airplanes? Are resources ready to handle servos and motors at the same time and prevent all potential clashes? I doubt it
  • Changing codebase maybe looked like a best solution to get F4, Dshot and so on. But was not the only way. Somehow INAV got it after all. And Betaflight got it. How? Thanks to The Community