16 ms·

I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an indust

by Taek 6y ago

I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on each other's ideas over multiple decades. In hardware, linters combine the best ideas of a single team, because everything is closed and proprietary and your own special 'secret sauce'. In software, I can import things for free like nginx and mysql and we have insanely complex compilers like llvm that are completely free. In hardware, the equivalent libraries are both 1-2 orders of magnitude less sophisticated (a disadvantage of everyone absolutely refusing to share knowledge with each other and let other people build on your own ideas for free), and also are going to cost you 6+ figures for anything remotely involved. Hardware is in the stone age of sophistication, and it entirely boils down to the fact that people don't work together to make bigger, more sophisticated projects. Genuinely would not surprise me if a strong open source community could push the capabilities of a 130nm stack beyond what many 7nm projects are capable of, simply because of the knowledge gap that would start to develop between the open and closed world.

marktangotango 6y ago
Could a lot of this backwardness also be explained by patents and litigation risk? There are a lot of patents around hardware, seems like there'd be a high chance of implementing something in hardware that is patented without knowing it's patented.
chii 6y ago
> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.
- edge17 6y ago
  Or it's artistic expression for a certain type of individual, and we have accessible art everywhere
- mobilefriendly 6y ago
  It actually took a lot of hard work in the early days, to prove the model as valid and also defend the legal code and rights that underpin FOSS.
- ddevault 6y ago
  This isn't true. Writing open source software is more profitable: it's cheaper (because everyone works on it) and works better (because everyone works on it).
  - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
    Do you have data to back this up? Because all accounts I've heard say that it's incredibly difficult to make money in open source.
    - ddevault 6y ago
      Making money only writing open source is possible, but complicated and out of scope for this comment. But writing some open source - making your tools (compilers, linters, runtimes), libraries, frameworks, monitoring, sysops/sysadmin tooling, and so on open source is much more profitable, and that's a huge subdomain of open source out there right now.
      - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
        This doesn't really answer my question though. Seems like the other comment to my question is spot on. If you divide all company actions into making money or saving money then open sourcing your toolset is more of a saving money thing as you can get people who aren't on your payroll to contribute to them. That's all well and good but not exactly what I think of when someone says "making money with open source."
m12k 6y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a single team in a successful company that managed to beat everyone else (and which may or may not have just gotten into a dominant position via e.g. bigger marketing spend). It's a true meritocracy, and the best ideas and tools don't just succeed and beat out everything else, they are also copied, so their innovation makes their competitors better too - and unlike the business world, this is seen as a plus. The best solutions end up combining the innovation and brilliance of a much larger group of people than any one team in the cutthroat world of traditional business. Just think about how much effort is wasted around the world every day by hundreds of thousands of companies reinventing the wheel because the thousands of other existing solutions to that exact problem were also created behind closed doors. Think about how much of this pointless duplication FOSS has already saved us from! I really hope the value of cooperation and the example set by FOSS can spread to more parts of society.
- naringas 6y ago
  but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in some sense the entire market works in cooperation, just not very efficiently (it optimizes for other things than efficiency and is heavily distorted by subsidies and tariffs)
  - m12k 6y ago
    I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.
gchadwick 6y ago
> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k Another interesting open source EDA project coming out of Google is Verible: https://github.com/google/verible https://github.com/google/verible which provides Verilog linting amongst other things.
kickopotomus 6y ago
I think the underlying issue here is that IC design is one or two orders of magnitude more complex than software. In my experience, the bar for entry into actual IC design is generally a masters or PhD in electrical engineering. There is a lot that goes into the design of an IC. Everything from the design itself to simulation, emulation, and validation. Then, depending on just how complex your IC is, you have to also think about integration with firmware and everything that involves as well.
- radicaldreamer 6y ago
  And the cost for failure is a lot, lot higher... it’s a different model of development because there are many different challenges involved.
  - neltnerb 6y ago
    Why is it so high if the fab is free? Intrinsic cost of development time and tooling?
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      Time especially (though costs are also high). Even with infinite budget you still have a cycle time of months between tape-out and silicon in hand.
      - neltnerb 6y ago
        Ah, you're talking about this as a current-day commercial project. Carry on :-) I'm a professional PCB designer among other things. Most of what I have learned came from hard-won experience designing PCBs for projects done for myself and my own education even though a custom PCB was hardly cost effective in a commercial sense. They were just much cheaper since my time was free. They weren't useless projects in that what I made was not easy with off the shelf parts, but it would have been possible and there wasn't a timeline to pressure me yet. But I would not be a professional PCB designer now if it had not been approachable to someone without a budget but with plenty of time and motivation. I've basically spent as much money learning how to make PCBs as other people spend on things like ski trips or going on vacations or other hobbies. A free fab and tools to create designs is a godsend when designing these things is something you want to do for interesting experiments and learning in an otherwise totally inaccessible field. Even if you think now one needs a masters or PhD to do this right, being able to fail cheaply is a pretty amazing learning tool... That's what this announcement means to me -- free fab means I can finally learn how to do this and get good enough at it that when the time comes that this is a better solution than trying to combine off the shelf functionality I will be well positioned to take advantage of that change. I am thrilled to release open source designs for cool chip functionality once I'm skilled enough to do it and the only way I'd get there is if the direct cost to me was nothing (even if it's slow).
dehrmann 6y ago
This sounds like there might be non-trivial gains out there if more people looked at how HDL is compiled to silicon.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not trust the C++ STL so they continued to use their own containers from the mid-90s - they did not want to use C++ templates at all so generic programming was out. While we did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind. The company was also extremely siloed - we could probably have reused a lot of code from other groups that were doing some similar things, but there was absolutely no communication between the groups let alone some kind of central code repo. EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.
- klyrs 6y ago
  FWIW a lot of c++ developers see std:: and TODO as synonyms. OTOH, having used some of Xilinx's tool, I'd be terrified to read the internals.
  - denkmoon 6y ago
    > std:: and TODO as synonyms What does this mean? I've only been in the C++ game for 6 years and for me if I can get something from std rather than rolling my own or pulling in another library, I'm cheering.
    - shaklee3 6y ago
      Lots of people replace STL with a faster one. See EA
      - 6y ago
robomartin 6y ago
This is a reality that exists in any limited market. Tools like nginx and mysql count their for-profit users in the in the millions. This means that there are tremendous opportunities for supporting development. By this I mean, companies and entities who use the FOSS products to support of their for-profit business in other domains, not directly profiting from the FOSS. FOSS development isn't cost-less. And so the business equation is always present. The degree to which purely academic support for open source can make progress is asymptotic. People need to eat, pay rent, have a life, which means someone has to pay for something. It might not be directly related to the FOSS tool, but people have to have income in order to contribute to these efforts. It is easy to show that something like Linux is likely the most expensive piece of software ever developed. This isn't to say the effort was not worth it. It's just to point out it wasn't free, it has a finite cost that is likely massive. An industry such as chip design is microscopic in size in terms of the number of seats of software used around the world. I don't have a number to offer, but I would not be surprised if the user based was ten million times smaller than, say, the mysql developer population (if not a hundred million). This means that nobody is going to be able to develop free tools without either massive altruistic corporate backing for a set of massive, complex, multi-year projects. If a company like Apple decided to invest a billion dollars to develop FOSS chip design tools and give them away, sure, it could happen. otherwise, not likely.
tlrobinson 6y ago
DARPA is also funding ($100M) open-source EDA tools ("IDEAS") and libraries ("POSH"): https://www.eetimes.com/darpa-unveils-100m-eda-project/ https://www.eetimes.com/darpa-unveils-100m-eda-project/ (this was 2 years ago, I'm not sure where they're at now)
- DHaldane 6y ago
  They just wrapped up Phase 1 of IDEA and POSH; programs that were explicitly trying to bring FOSS to hardware. There are now open-source end-to-end automated flows for RTL to GDS like OpenRoad. JITX (YCS18) was funded under IDEA to automate circuit board design, and we're now celebrating our first users. Great program.
foobiekr 6y ago
The whole industry still operates like the 90s right down to license management and terrible tooling. It's one of the few multi-billion dollar industries that was mostly untouched in the dotcom, and is still very old-school today. The problem is, it's also a very, very tough industry to disrupt. Not for lack of trying though.
ian-g 6y ago
My last job was supporting some hardware companies' design VC. Absolutely insane. I think it's also a cultural thing. Like you said, lots of your own special secret sauce, and so many issues trying to fix bugs that may have to do with that secret sauce. Can't say I miss it at all really.
gentleman11 6y ago
I am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a much worse developer experience with worse tooling overall. To play devils advocate, it this makes game dev harder, which isn’t entirely bad because there is already a massive number of games being made that can’t sell, so it reduces competition a tiny bit. Also, it’s nice to know you can write a plugin and actually sell it. Still, it’s weird. The community in unreal can even be a bit unfriendly or hostile and they will sometimes mock you if you say you are trying to use Linux. Then again, unity’s community is unbelievably helpful
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  Commercial games benefit way less than other code from being open source, since they are very short-lived projects once released. Further, games would be very easy to copy for users, to develop cheats for multiplayer, to duplicate by competitors, etc.
  - gentleman11 6y ago
    The games, sure. But what about the tooling? Behaviour trees, fsm visualizers, debug tools, better linters, multiplayer frameworks, ecs implementations, or even just tech talks. Outside of game dev, there are so many tech talks all the time on every possible subject, sharing knowledge. In game dev, there is GDC and a few others, but it’s just far less common
  - tpxl 6y ago
    The closest of multiplayer games die the day they shut down the servers. The longest lived games are the longest lived because they are open enough for the community to keep them alive.
- vvanders 6y ago
  That depends a lot on platform and engine. X360 development was still one of the best damn environments on dedicated hardware I've ever worked on. PIX was nothing short of amazing and Visual Studio is still a bar I haven't seen touched from and IDE perspective. Compare that with something like Android where I'm lucky if I can get GDB to hit a single breakpoint on a good day.
aswanson 6y ago
Posts like this make me so glad I was directed by market forces out of hardware design into software.
DesiLurker 6y ago
I have thought about this at one point and have many friends in the EDA industry. I can say with conviction that you are absolutely right. If you want to imagine a parallel to software, just imagine what would have happened to open source movement if gcc did not existed. that is the first choke point in eda and then there are proprietary libraries for everything. add to this an intentionally inoptimal software designed to maximize the revenue and you get a taste of where we are at this point. IMO the best thing that can happen is some company or a consortium of fabless silicon companies buy up a underdog EDA company and just opensource everything including code/patents/bugreports. I'd bet within a few years we would have more progress than we had in last 30 years.
josemanuel 6y ago
The interesting thing with open source is that it devalues the contribution of the software engineer. Your effort and ideas are now worth 0. You either do that work for free, on your spare time, or are paid by some company to write software that is seen, by the company paying you, as a commodity. Open source is at the extreme end of neoliberalism. It is really a concept from the savage capitalist mentality of the MBA bots that run the corporate world. They certainly love open source.
- x0 6y ago
  Companies love open source projects with MIT-style licenses. If you license your project GPL, no company will touch it, unless they really, really have to.
m463 6y ago
I think it might need a "stone soup" kickstart.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stock_toaster 6y ago
It’s interesting to consider this from a finance standpoint too. Consider/compare/contrast with open source software ecosystems where large amounts of money that large companies are able to effectively “strip mine” from the ecosystem. Hopefully there is a middle ground somewhere, where the folks working on open source software can get compensated for their work so as to enable a healthier system overall, so we aren't all just “software serfs” sharecropping for our overlords.
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  License your work under the AGPL, and they can't do that – at least, without arranging another license with you.
chubot 6y ago
Yes 100%. Maybe software is really unique in this regard, and HN and such forums are a gift? Tangent: I've noticed this problem in dentistry and sleep apnea! The methods of knowledge transfer in the field seem to be incredibly inefficient? Or there are tons of dentists not learning new things? (I recall a few dentists on HN -- I would be interested in any comment either way on this.) The reason I say this is that many patients can't tolerate CPAP (>50% by some measures). There are other solutions, and judging by conversations with friends and family, dentists and doctors don't even know about them! ---- My dentist gave me one of these alternative treatments for sleep apnea, which was very effective. It's mandibular advancement device (oral appliance). Even the name is bad! They have a marketing and branding problem. Random: Apparently Joe Rogan's dentist did a similar thing with a different device which he himself invented. Rogan mentioned it 3 times on the air. So basically it appears to me that practitioners in this field don't exchange information in the same way that software practitioners do (to say nothing of exchanging the equivalent of working code, which is possible in theory). I looked it up and there are apparently 200K dentists in the United States. It seems like a good area for a common forum. I think the problem is that dentists probably compete too much rather than cooperate? There is no financial incentive to set up a site of free knowledge exchange. Related recent threads I wrote about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666639 (related to bruxism, there seem to be a lot of dentists who don't seem to understand this, as I know multiple people with sleep apnea and bruxism who don't understand the connection) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 (the book Jaws)
- brnt 6y ago
  > mandibular advancement device Those things are in the basic apnea treatment palet over here (Netherlands), actually more common than PAP machines. Why do you think they are alternative?
  - chubot 6y ago
    Well the picture might be totally different in the Netherlands. In the US, CPAP is the most common treatment, even though so many people can't use them (including me). I've talked to several people who have a CPAP, and they don't even know of the existence of the mandibular advancement device. Their doctors and dentists apparently don't tell them about it! I'm puzzled why that is the case. I think it has something to do with insurance. If that's true, it's not surprising that other countries don't have the same problem!
techslave 6y ago
also have you seen what passes for software in the hardware world? i’m talking about EDA. i haven’t used cadence etc but altium is an trash fire and it’s $5k/seat. below that level the tools are even more atrocious. i’m mystified why someone doesn’t come in and disrupt that space.
- madengr 6y ago
  I don’t know why you say it’s a trash fire. I’ve been using it for 25 years and it works well, granted I don’t do more than 8 layer boards, but they are dense RF. It will require a team knowing professional software development and professional PCB design to disrupt it. When you get only one of those, you get the trash fire.
andrepd 6y ago
Absolutely. The capitalist conception of closed competition and profit motive is taken virtually as dogma nowadays. However we see its many disadvantages: there are multiple companies ("teams of people") spending billions of dollars and millions of man-hours in largely duplicated efforts which lead in the end to an inferior product that what could be done with cooperation. Imagine a combined Intel+AMD+Samsung+Nvidia behemoth pooling together their expertise. Internal competition would still exist, but for actual technical reasons now instead of market ones. One could imagine myriad ways to fund such a cooperative endeavour, which are never even tried because the current model is sacred.
staycoolboy 6y ago
You're making an argument that open source is better because it is free. This is a 30 year old argument. The problem is, people need to get paid in the interim. For exmaple, Intel is the biggest contributer to the linux kernel, but without Intel paying its employees by charging for chips, millions of patches would never have made it into Linux. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it is more nuanced than you are implying.

by Taek 6y ago

marktangotango 6y ago

Could a lot of this backwardness also be explained by patents and litigation risk? There are a lot of patents around hardware, seems like there'd be a high chance of implementing something in hardware that is patented without knowing it's patented.

chii 6y ago

> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.

edge17 6y ago
Or it's artistic expression for a certain type of individual, and we have accessible art everywhere
mobilefriendly 6y ago
It actually took a lot of hard work in the early days, to prove the model as valid and also defend the legal code and rights that underpin FOSS.
ddevault 6y ago
This isn't true. Writing open source software is more profitable: it's cheaper (because everyone works on it) and works better (because everyone works on it).
- BoysenberryPi 6y ago
  Do you have data to back this up? Because all accounts I've heard say that it's incredibly difficult to make money in open source.
  - ddevault 6y ago
    Making money only writing open source is possible, but complicated and out of scope for this comment. But writing some open source - making your tools (compilers, linters, runtimes), libraries, frameworks, monitoring, sysops/sysadmin tooling, and so on open source is much more profitable, and that's a huge subdomain of open source out there right now.
    - BoysenberryPi 6y ago
      This doesn't really answer my question though. Seems like the other comment to my question is spot on. If you divide all company actions into making money or saving money then open sourcing your toolset is more of a saving money thing as you can get people who aren't on your payroll to contribute to them. That's all well and good but not exactly what I think of when someone says "making money with open source."

m12k 6y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a single team in a successful company that managed to beat everyone else (and which may or may not have just gotten into a dominant position via e.g. bigger marketing spend). It's a true meritocracy, and the best ideas and tools don't just succeed and beat out everything else, they are also copied, so their innovation makes their competitors better too - and unlike the business world, this is seen as a plus. The best solutions end up combining the innovation and brilliance of a much larger group of people than any one team in the cutthroat world of traditional business. Just think about how much effort is wasted around the world every day by hundreds of thousands of companies reinventing the wheel because the thousands of other existing solutions to that exact problem were also created behind closed doors. Think about how much of this pointless duplication FOSS has already saved us from! I really hope the value of cooperation and the example set by FOSS can spread to more parts of society.

naringas 6y ago
but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in some sense the entire market works in cooperation, just not very efficiently (it optimizes for other things than efficiency and is heavily distorted by subsidies and tariffs)
- m12k 6y ago
  I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.

gchadwick 6y ago

> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k Another interesting open source EDA project coming out of Google is Verible: https://github.com/google/verible https://github.com/google/verible which provides Verilog linting amongst other things.

kickopotomus 6y ago

I think the underlying issue here is that IC design is one or two orders of magnitude more complex than software. In my experience, the bar for entry into actual IC design is generally a masters or PhD in electrical engineering. There is a lot that goes into the design of an IC. Everything from the design itself to simulation, emulation, and validation. Then, depending on just how complex your IC is, you have to also think about integration with firmware and everything that involves as well.

radicaldreamer 6y ago
And the cost for failure is a lot, lot higher... it’s a different model of development because there are many different challenges involved.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  Why is it so high if the fab is free? Intrinsic cost of development time and tooling?
  - rcxdude 6y ago
    Time especially (though costs are also high). Even with infinite budget you still have a cycle time of months between tape-out and silicon in hand.
    - neltnerb 6y ago
      Ah, you're talking about this as a current-day commercial project. Carry on :-) I'm a professional PCB designer among other things. Most of what I have learned came from hard-won experience designing PCBs for projects done for myself and my own education even though a custom PCB was hardly cost effective in a commercial sense. They were just much cheaper since my time was free. They weren't useless projects in that what I made was not easy with off the shelf parts, but it would have been possible and there wasn't a timeline to pressure me yet. But I would not be a professional PCB designer now if it had not been approachable to someone without a budget but with plenty of time and motivation. I've basically spent as much money learning how to make PCBs as other people spend on things like ski trips or going on vacations or other hobbies. A free fab and tools to create designs is a godsend when designing these things is something you want to do for interesting experiments and learning in an otherwise totally inaccessible field. Even if you think now one needs a masters or PhD to do this right, being able to fail cheaply is a pretty amazing learning tool... That's what this announcement means to me -- free fab means I can finally learn how to do this and get good enough at it that when the time comes that this is a better solution than trying to combine off the shelf functionality I will be well positioned to take advantage of that change. I am thrilled to release open source designs for cool chip functionality once I'm skilled enough to do it and the only way I'd get there is if the direct cost to me was nothing (even if it's slow).

dehrmann 6y ago

This sounds like there might be non-trivial gains out there if more people looked at how HDL is compiled to silicon.

UncleOxidant 6y ago

I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not trust the C++ STL so they continued to use their own containers from the mid-90s - they did not want to use C++ templates at all so generic programming was out. While we did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind. The company was also extremely siloed - we could probably have reused a lot of code from other groups that were doing some similar things, but there was absolutely no communication between the groups let alone some kind of central code repo. EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.

klyrs 6y ago
FWIW a lot of c++ developers see std:: and TODO as synonyms. OTOH, having used some of Xilinx's tool, I'd be terrified to read the internals.
- denkmoon 6y ago
  > std:: and TODO as synonyms What does this mean? I've only been in the C++ game for 6 years and for me if I can get something from std rather than rolling my own or pulling in another library, I'm cheering.
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    Lots of people replace STL with a faster one. See EA
    - 6y ago

robomartin 6y ago

This is a reality that exists in any limited market. Tools like nginx and mysql count their for-profit users in the in the millions. This means that there are tremendous opportunities for supporting development. By this I mean, companies and entities who use the FOSS products to support of their for-profit business in other domains, not directly profiting from the FOSS. FOSS development isn't cost-less. And so the business equation is always present. The degree to which purely academic support for open source can make progress is asymptotic. People need to eat, pay rent, have a life, which means someone has to pay for something. It might not be directly related to the FOSS tool, but people have to have income in order to contribute to these efforts. It is easy to show that something like Linux is likely the most expensive piece of software ever developed. This isn't to say the effort was not worth it. It's just to point out it wasn't free, it has a finite cost that is likely massive. An industry such as chip design is microscopic in size in terms of the number of seats of software used around the world. I don't have a number to offer, but I would not be surprised if the user based was ten million times smaller than, say, the mysql developer population (if not a hundred million). This means that nobody is going to be able to develop free tools without either massive altruistic corporate backing for a set of massive, complex, multi-year projects. If a company like Apple decided to invest a billion dollars to develop FOSS chip design tools and give them away, sure, it could happen. otherwise, not likely.

tlrobinson 6y ago

DARPA is also funding ($100M) open-source EDA tools ("IDEAS") and libraries ("POSH"): https://www.eetimes.com/darpa-unveils-100m-eda-project/ https://www.eetimes.com/darpa-unveils-100m-eda-project/ (this was 2 years ago, I'm not sure where they're at now)

DHaldane 6y ago
They just wrapped up Phase 1 of IDEA and POSH; programs that were explicitly trying to bring FOSS to hardware. There are now open-source end-to-end automated flows for RTL to GDS like OpenRoad. JITX (YCS18) was funded under IDEA to automate circuit board design, and we're now celebrating our first users. Great program.

foobiekr 6y ago

The whole industry still operates like the 90s right down to license management and terrible tooling. It's one of the few multi-billion dollar industries that was mostly untouched in the dotcom, and is still very old-school today. The problem is, it's also a very, very tough industry to disrupt. Not for lack of trying though.

ian-g 6y ago

My last job was supporting some hardware companies' design VC. Absolutely insane. I think it's also a cultural thing. Like you said, lots of your own special secret sauce, and so many issues trying to fix bugs that may have to do with that secret sauce. Can't say I miss it at all really.

gentleman11 6y ago

I am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a much worse developer experience with worse tooling overall. To play devils advocate, it this makes game dev harder, which isn’t entirely bad because there is already a massive number of games being made that can’t sell, so it reduces competition a tiny bit. Also, it’s nice to know you can write a plugin and actually sell it. Still, it’s weird. The community in unreal can even be a bit unfriendly or hostile and they will sometimes mock you if you say you are trying to use Linux. Then again, unity’s community is unbelievably helpful

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
Commercial games benefit way less than other code from being open source, since they are very short-lived projects once released. Further, games would be very easy to copy for users, to develop cheats for multiplayer, to duplicate by competitors, etc.
- gentleman11 6y ago
  The games, sure. But what about the tooling? Behaviour trees, fsm visualizers, debug tools, better linters, multiplayer frameworks, ecs implementations, or even just tech talks. Outside of game dev, there are so many tech talks all the time on every possible subject, sharing knowledge. In game dev, there is GDC and a few others, but it’s just far less common
- tpxl 6y ago
  The closest of multiplayer games die the day they shut down the servers. The longest lived games are the longest lived because they are open enough for the community to keep them alive.
vvanders 6y ago
That depends a lot on platform and engine. X360 development was still one of the best damn environments on dedicated hardware I've ever worked on. PIX was nothing short of amazing and Visual Studio is still a bar I haven't seen touched from and IDE perspective. Compare that with something like Android where I'm lucky if I can get GDB to hit a single breakpoint on a good day.

aswanson 6y ago

Posts like this make me so glad I was directed by market forces out of hardware design into software.

DesiLurker 6y ago

I have thought about this at one point and have many friends in the EDA industry. I can say with conviction that you are absolutely right. If you want to imagine a parallel to software, just imagine what would have happened to open source movement if gcc did not existed. that is the first choke point in eda and then there are proprietary libraries for everything. add to this an intentionally inoptimal software designed to maximize the revenue and you get a taste of where we are at this point. IMO the best thing that can happen is some company or a consortium of fabless silicon companies buy up a underdog EDA company and just opensource everything including code/patents/bugreports. I'd bet within a few years we would have more progress than we had in last 30 years.

josemanuel 6y ago

The interesting thing with open source is that it devalues the contribution of the software engineer. Your effort and ideas are now worth 0. You either do that work for free, on your spare time, or are paid by some company to write software that is seen, by the company paying you, as a commodity. Open source is at the extreme end of neoliberalism. It is really a concept from the savage capitalist mentality of the MBA bots that run the corporate world. They certainly love open source.

x0 6y ago
Companies love open source projects with MIT-style licenses. If you license your project GPL, no company will touch it, unless they really, really have to.

m463 6y ago

I think it might need a "stone soup" kickstart.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stock_toaster 6y ago

It’s interesting to consider this from a finance standpoint too. Consider/compare/contrast with open source software ecosystems where large amounts of money that large companies are able to effectively “strip mine” from the ecosystem. Hopefully there is a middle ground somewhere, where the folks working on open source software can get compensated for their work so as to enable a healthier system overall, so we aren't all just “software serfs” sharecropping for our overlords.

wizzwizz4 6y ago
License your work under the AGPL, and they can't do that – at least, without arranging another license with you.

chubot 6y ago

Yes 100%. Maybe software is really unique in this regard, and HN and such forums are a gift? Tangent: I've noticed this problem in dentistry and sleep apnea! The methods of knowledge transfer in the field seem to be incredibly inefficient? Or there are tons of dentists not learning new things? (I recall a few dentists on HN -- I would be interested in any comment either way on this.) The reason I say this is that many patients can't tolerate CPAP (>50% by some measures). There are other solutions, and judging by conversations with friends and family, dentists and doctors don't even know about them! ---- My dentist gave me one of these alternative treatments for sleep apnea, which was very effective. It's mandibular advancement device (oral appliance). Even the name is bad! They have a marketing and branding problem. Random: Apparently Joe Rogan's dentist did a similar thing with a different device which he himself invented. Rogan mentioned it 3 times on the air. So basically it appears to me that practitioners in this field don't exchange information in the same way that software practitioners do (to say nothing of exchanging the equivalent of working code, which is possible in theory). I looked it up and there are apparently 200K dentists in the United States. It seems like a good area for a common forum. I think the problem is that dentists probably compete too much rather than cooperate? There is no financial incentive to set up a site of free knowledge exchange. Related recent threads I wrote about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666639 (related to bruxism, there seem to be a lot of dentists who don't seem to understand this, as I know multiple people with sleep apnea and bruxism who don't understand the connection) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23435964 (the book Jaws)

brnt 6y ago
> mandibular advancement device Those things are in the basic apnea treatment palet over here (Netherlands), actually more common than PAP machines. Why do you think they are alternative?
- chubot 6y ago
  Well the picture might be totally different in the Netherlands. In the US, CPAP is the most common treatment, even though so many people can't use them (including me). I've talked to several people who have a CPAP, and they don't even know of the existence of the mandibular advancement device. Their doctors and dentists apparently don't tell them about it! I'm puzzled why that is the case. I think it has something to do with insurance. If that's true, it's not surprising that other countries don't have the same problem!

techslave 6y ago

also have you seen what passes for software in the hardware world? i’m talking about EDA. i haven’t used cadence etc but altium is an trash fire and it’s $5k/seat. below that level the tools are even more atrocious. i’m mystified why someone doesn’t come in and disrupt that space.

madengr 6y ago
I don’t know why you say it’s a trash fire. I’ve been using it for 25 years and it works well, granted I don’t do more than 8 layer boards, but they are dense RF. It will require a team knowing professional software development and professional PCB design to disrupt it. When you get only one of those, you get the trash fire.

andrepd 6y ago

Absolutely. The capitalist conception of closed competition and profit motive is taken virtually as dogma nowadays. However we see its many disadvantages: there are multiple companies ("teams of people") spending billions of dollars and millions of man-hours in largely duplicated efforts which lead in the end to an inferior product that what could be done with cooperation. Imagine a combined Intel+AMD+Samsung+Nvidia behemoth pooling together their expertise. Internal competition would still exist, but for actual technical reasons now instead of market ones. One could imagine myriad ways to fund such a cooperative endeavour, which are never even tried because the current model is sacred.

staycoolboy 6y ago

You're making an argument that open source is better because it is free. This is a 30 year old argument. The problem is, people need to get paid in the interim. For exmaple, Intel is the biggest contributer to the linux kernel, but without Intel paying its employees by charging for chips, millions of patches would never have made it into Linux. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying it is more nuanced than you are implying.