3 ms·

you are missing forest for the trees. ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice wo

you are missing forest for the trees. ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit.... Tomorrow USA can force ARM to not sell products to countries on their naughty list. They can do that because of sanctions but what about those countries? why should say IRAN or russia not get to enjoy the fruits of open source because foss/open source does not care about such petty things, in the long run. If i build a GPL software/hardware, i don't care if iranians or americans or russians or chinese use it. If i was building proprietary one, then i do care. >With RISC-V why would a company which designed a high-end CPU core license it to anyone instead of trying to maximize their profit/competitive advantage? With Arm at least there something to fallback to accessible for everyone. FOSS ?

qwytw 4y ago
> ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" Yes but how does that incentivize western companies to invest into RISC-V? I mean any western company would have to comply with US sanctions if they want to do business with US companies regardless of the architecture they are using. And if they don’t care about any of that they might as well just use ARM anyway without licensing it. It’s not like all the documentation required wasn’t already leaked anyway making it basically equivalent to RISC-V (if you don’t want to play by the (western) rules). In fact it probably make more sense for Iran or Russia to clone ARM/x86 designs because they don’t have enough resources or expertise to create anything even marginally competitive on their own. > If i build a GPL software/hardware, i don't care if iranians or americans or russians or chinese use it. If i was building proprietary one, then i do care. > FOSS ? Unlike in software there seems to be little incentive for companies to opensource their designs. Why would a hardware company which invested millions to design a RISC-V core give it away for free to their competitors? Unless they can monetize it some other way (.e.g like software companies can) there is no incentive for them to do that.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >Why would a hardware company which invested millions to design a RISC-V core give it away for free to their competitors? I wonder. But it's a fact it's already happened a few times. And the cores aren't even bad[0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Open_source
snvzz 4y ago
>ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit.... RISC-V Foundation timely moved to Switzerland before this became an issue. From what I heard from my contacts, RISC-V did so to accommodate Chinese companies which were deeply concerned that US export restrictions would become an issue; RISC-V is huge in China.
loudmax 4y ago
> ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit.... > Tomorrow USA can force ARM to not sell products to countries on their naughty list. You make it sound like sanctions are arbitrary. The United States may not be perfect and may not always live up to its ideals. But there is an enormous difference between the imperfect democracies of the liberal world order (eg. US, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc) and the autocracies or downright totalitarian crypto-fascism in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Both sides are imperfect, but they are not equally imperfect. I want RISC-V to succeed. I believe in the freedom that FOSS delivers. The fact that dictators will be able to use these tools to oppress their citizens is unfortunate consequence of this freedom.

qwytw 4y ago

> ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" Yes but how does that incentivize western companies to invest into RISC-V? I mean any western company would have to comply with US sanctions if they want to do business with US companies regardless of the architecture they are using. And if they don’t care about any of that they might as well just use ARM anyway without licensing it. It’s not like all the documentation required wasn’t already leaked anyway making it basically equivalent to RISC-V (if you don’t want to play by the (western) rules). In fact it probably make more sense for Iran or Russia to clone ARM/x86 designs because they don’t have enough resources or expertise to create anything even marginally competitive on their own. > If i build a GPL software/hardware, i don't care if iranians or americans or russians or chinese use it. If i was building proprietary one, then i do care. > FOSS ? Unlike in software there seems to be little incentive for companies to opensource their designs. Why would a hardware company which invested millions to design a RISC-V core give it away for free to their competitors? Unless they can monetize it some other way (.e.g like software companies can) there is no incentive for them to do that.

snvzz 4y ago
>Why would a hardware company which invested millions to design a RISC-V core give it away for free to their competitors? I wonder. But it's a fact it's already happened a few times. And the cores aren't even bad[0]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Open_source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V#Open_source

snvzz 4y ago

>ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit.... RISC-V Foundation timely moved to Switzerland before this became an issue. From what I heard from my contacts, RISC-V did so to accommodate Chinese companies which were deeply concerned that US export restrictions would become an issue; RISC-V is huge in China.

loudmax 4y ago

> ARM licensing allows USA to enforce their "rule of law" or whatever BS on the rest of the world, "sanctions" is a nice word that gets thrown around a bit.... > Tomorrow USA can force ARM to not sell products to countries on their naughty list. You make it sound like sanctions are arbitrary. The United States may not be perfect and may not always live up to its ideals. But there is an enormous difference between the imperfect democracies of the liberal world order (eg. US, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc) and the autocracies or downright totalitarian crypto-fascism in Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Both sides are imperfect, but they are not equally imperfect. I want RISC-V to succeed. I believe in the freedom that FOSS delivers. The fact that dictators will be able to use these tools to oppress their citizens is unfortunate consequence of this freedom.