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It is inevitable that the first sentence will itself become false. As things go forward the ISA will be open source but the cores themselves will cease to be.
by foobiekr 8y ago
It is inevitable that the first sentence will itself become false. As things go forward the ISA will be open source but the cores themselves will cease to be.
- ajross 8y agoThat's not the way it happened in software. As free implementations come to dominate it's the proprietary products that tend to wither. The existence of ANSI C89 as an open standard didn't result in an explosion of proprietary yet compatible compilers, instead GCC ate the world within a decade. I mean, sure. You can make a closed-off RISC-V. But I don't see why that's required or "inevitable".
- flukus 8y agoGCC is licensed under the GPL, RISC-V chose a license that allows for proprietary modifications. Inevitable might be taking things too far, but it's certainly within the realm of possibilities and thanks to the license always will be.
- nickik 8y agoWhy? There are many different organisations including universities companies and so on that want to use the open cores and many of them either develop new stuff fully open or partly open. Also, the chips can be both, you can have open source implementations and close source implementations and when you are building a chip you have to make the choices just as in software.