I had contact with Pelle and he is working on version 8.0 at the moment. He has no fixed release date yet, but it is going on.
This is good to hear.
I really wish Pelle would rejoin us... even if it's only for an hour Saturday Mornings... He is the only person who really knows what's going on under the hood and it would be a big boost for all of us if we could actually speak to him.
As for open sourcing the project ... I vote
NO! In my experience open source usually invites a competition with every half-assed coder competing to get his silly new function included. The project soon becomes bloated and eventually unsustainable.
For a very good example of what can happen, take a look at the D programming language... This is a powerful compiler with most of the right ideas. However Digital Mars made the tragic mistake of going Open Source for their RTL, resulting in 2 competing libraries, both loaded to the tilts with stuff nobody will ever use.
That said... I would strongly urge Pelle to find 2 or 3 people he trusts and go to a team approach for the project. This is a huge undertaking, too much for one person to do adequately and sadly it seems to be suffering for it as the toolchain is being updated but ancilliary issues such as outdated Windows API headers and libs continue. Dividing up the work... Perhaps handing the Windows API maintenance off to someone else would surely improve the project by leaps and bounds.
Anyway... I guess you noticed... I'm baaaaack...