Not that I haven't complained about RISC-V's seeming, now proven, lack of openness from the beginning, but did you ever find out why they restricted access to people with UC Berkeley associations?
It can't be: the license, newbie complains, IP theft concerns, etc., I give up. I would have asked them point blank, myself and put it in the update. It's counter productive to their stated goals.
Thanks, David
On Wednesday, January 1, 2020, David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
Not that I haven't complained about RISC-V's seeming, now proven, lack of openness from the beginning, but did you ever find out why they restricted access to people with UC Berkeley associations?
it wasn't "deliberate", it's just pure academic arrogance. "we're better than everyone else, we have to filter out bullshit, we know and trust these people, we haven't time to "vet" other sources of knowledge and expertise, and if they don't sign *our* agreement then regardless of what Trademark Law actually says they can go f### themselves because we know better"
It can't be: the license, newbie complains, IP theft concerns, etc., I give up. I would have asked them point blank, myself and put it in the update. It's counter productive to their stated goals.
several people independebtly know that.
l.
On Wed, 1 Jan 2020 03:10:58 +0800 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
On Wednesday, January 1, 2020, David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
Not that I haven't complained about RISC-V's seeming, now proven, lack of openness from the beginning, but did you ever find out why they restricted access to people with UC Berkeley associations?
it wasn't "deliberate", it's just pure academic arrogance. "we're better than everyone else, we have to filter out bullshit, we know and trust these people, we haven't time to "vet" other sources of knowledge and expertise, and if they don't sign *our* agreement then regardless of what Trademark Law actually says they can go f### themselves because we know better"
Maybe I have not been clear, how does signing an agreement or joining UC "vet" people? I always thought that my code/schematics vetted me as a fool or a wise man.
Thanks, David
On 12/31/19, David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
Maybe I have not been clear, how does signing an agreement or joining UC "vet" people? I always thought that my code/schematics vetted me as a fool or a wise man.
it's not that simple when it comes to collaboration where it really matters if incompatibilty is hosed.
trademark law - actually Certification Mark Law - is the "safety barrier" behind which interoperability actually works.
the problem is: it is *essential* that the Trademark holder be FRAND - Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminary, if they wish to actually continue to hold that Trademark.
The RISC-V Foundation have been BLATANTLY unfair, unreasonable and discriminatory, for a protacted, consistent and persistent time-period, spanning SEVERAL YEARS.
l.
On Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:02:51 +0000 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
On 12/31/19, David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
Maybe I have not been clear, how does signing an agreement or joining UC "vet" people? I always thought that my code/schematics vetted me as a fool or a wise man.
it's not that simple when it comes to collaboration where it really matters if incompatibilty is hosed.
<snip>
That's a really interesting reply. Do you mean that there is no way to pretest changes, say with an FPGA and only Silicon will prove the design? Or is there no ongoing testing? Or what?
Thanks, David
On 1/1/20, David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
On Tue, 31 Dec 2019 23:02:51 +0000 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
On 12/31/19, David Niklas doark@mail.com wrote:
Maybe I have not been clear, how does signing an agreement or joining UC "vet" people? I always thought that my code/schematics vetted me as a fool or a wise man.
it's not that simple when it comes to collaboration where it really matters if incompatibilty is hosed.
<snip>
That's a really interesting reply. Do you mean that there is no way to pretest changes, say with an FPGA and only Silicon will prove the design? Or is there no ongoing testing? Or what?
no, it's that if the Trademark Holder refuses to respect Trademark Law, failing repeatedly to respond to reasonable and in-good-faith requests to have taken into consideration the unique Libre-transparent *business* circumstances that were never, in any way shape or form envisaged by the Founders at the time of the creation of the Membership Agreement - the one that every other *business* is perfectly happy to sign because no other business that signed the Agreement gives a flying fuck about transparency and trust for the benefit *of end-users* (not shareholders) - then the *technical* aspects you describe - testing, pretesting, silicon, FPAGs - all that is absolutely and utterly irrelevant.
the collaboration that is in place, and which is otherwise successfully taking place, is taking place behind *closed doors*, where we, as Libre Businesses, are told, basically, "sign this agreement which entirely compromises your business model, or go fuck yourself".
by complete contrast...
the OpenPower Foundation's Director, Hugh Blemings, is someone who has worked with Libre Developers (he himself is one) for over two, nearly three decades.
*he* was the one that told *me* that the OpenPower Foundation Members have created a Membership Agreement that is specifically designed to allow Libre Businesses to be "happy" with its terms and conditions.
l.
On 2020-01-01 22:09, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
the collaboration that is in place, and which is otherwise successfully taking place, is taking place behind *closed doors*, where we, as Libre Businesses, are told, basically, "sign this agreement which entirely compromises your business model, or go fuck yourself".
I haven't followed what goes on with RISC-V licensing, but it rather sounds like there are vested interests who want to retain control and to leverage their inherent advantage as developers of the technologies concerned. This is a pretty familiar story from the world of standards, even Internet standards, where companies effectively "front-run" standards by loading them up with descriptions of their own technologies, effectively requiring standards implementers to play catch-up all the time.
This latter strategy is not quite the same thing as, say, people being gatekeepers to a CPU architecture, but it is part of a more general phenomenon of stacking the odds in one's own favour and disadvantaging outsiders. A more mundane example would be any one of numerous corporate-run Free Software projects that demand copyright or comprehensive licensing assignments from contributors, and who make it tediously difficult to get code upstream, all because the company's needs supposedly override all others.
by complete contrast...
the OpenPower Foundation's Director, Hugh Blemings, is someone who has worked with Libre Developers (he himself is one) for over two, nearly three decades.
*he* was the one that told *me* that the OpenPower Foundation Members have created a Membership Agreement that is specifically designed to allow Libre Businesses to be "happy" with its terms and conditions.
Maybe ARM's success is a corrupting influence when companies and organisations try to monetise hardware architectures, but ARM only got into its lucrative position through a combination of good luck and a fervour for licensing things, the latter only ever coming about as some kind of correction for ARM's corporate predecessor's obsession with keeping everything proprietary and trying to use such proprietary technologies to their own exclusive competitive advantage. It will be interesting to see how the different initiatives (RISC-V, OpenPower, MIPS...) evolve to respond to openness concerns and the need to cultivate interest in their offerings more generally.
Paul
On 1/1/20, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On 2020-01-01 22:09, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
the collaboration that is in place, and which is otherwise successfully taking place, is taking place behind *closed doors*, where we, as Libre Businesses, are told, basically, "sign this agreement which entirely compromises your business model, or go fuck yourself".
I haven't followed what goes on with RISC-V licensing, but it rather sounds like there are vested interests who want to retain control and to leverage their inherent advantage as developers of the technologies concerned.
this resonates with the behaviour i've seen. it's also that, well, they just don't care. i've witnessed around a dozen people, now, including several professors from highly-regarded world-renowned universities, just "give up" and walk away from the mailing lists.
on the other hand when an employee from qualcomm innnocently / accidentally cross-posted a question onto the isa-dev mailing list, warnings were issued "there's more at stake, here" which basically implied, "shut the fuck up you moron, we want qualcom's money: your answers, questions and honesty are causing them to become extremely nervous about using RISC-V".
then, there is the weird behaviour of SiFive, with the promise of "fixing the problems of other ISAs" then rushing ahead without proper consultation and "laying down the law".
This is a pretty familiar story from the world of standards, even Internet standards, where companies effectively "front-run" standards by loading them up with descriptions of their own technologies, effectively requiring standards implementers to play catch-up all the time.
yyyup. that's precisely and exactly what's happened.
This latter strategy is not quite the same thing as, say, people being gatekeepers to a CPU architecture, but it is part of a more general phenomenon of stacking the odds in one's own favour and disadvantaging outsiders. A more mundane example would be any one of numerous corporate-run Free Software projects that demand copyright or comprehensive licensing assignments from contributors, and who make it tediously difficult to get code upstream, all because the company's needs supposedly override all others.
yes, this is uncalled for. however, as we've learned from the EOMA68 Certification Mark, having a *Certification Mark* behind a standard, for the protection and safety of users, turns out to be absolutely essential, *even if* the source code is GPL'd / Libre-Licensed.
i would not have a problem with the RISC-V Foundation if they actually, properly, truly understood Trademark Law and their legal obligations and responsibilties.
by complete contrast...
the OpenPower Foundation's Director, Hugh Blemings, is someone who has worked with Libre Developers (he himself is one) for over two, nearly three decades.
*he* was the one that told *me* that the OpenPower Foundation Members have created a Membership Agreement that is specifically designed to allow Libre Businesses to be "happy" with its terms and conditions.
Maybe ARM's success is a corrupting influence when companies and organisations try to monetise hardware architectures, but ARM only got into its lucrative position through a combination of good luck and a fervour for licensing things,
only because they were desperate! see below... :)
the latter only ever coming about as some kind of correction for ARM's corporate predecessor's obsession with keeping everything proprietary and trying to use such proprietary technologies to their own exclusive competitive advantage.
funny story: my friend barry worked for LSI Logic, with norman wilson. the two of them, how can we put it diplomatically... LSI's goal was, um, "to make the customer's design actually work".
undiplomatically: ARM's first processors were non-working piles of f*****g s**t.
after they got the ARM7 functional, barry managed to get ARM their very first license, ever: with Plessey. they were so happy, they offered him a job. barry turned it down: he would have been employee number 12, and a very rich man, now :)
but ARM - aka ACORN RISC machines (not Advanced RISC Machines) - basically had zero cash, and at one point was completely unable to pay its employees (this is like... early 1990s). they licensed the ARM11 design to Intel for GBP 100,000, unrestricted, royalty-free, in exchange for a promise from the team that IBM had bought (the DEC Alpha developers), would "fix all the problems and give the changes back".
the DEC Alpha developers - whom Intel themselves didn't know what to do with, so gave them the PXA Project to do - took one look at the HDL and went "holy f*** this is s**t" and started again from scratch. they could do so because they had that GBP 100,000 royalty-free license from ARM, and the contract wasn't worded carefully enough.
thus, the PXA 2xx series became the world's first superscalar ARM-compatible architecture... *not* the ARM Cortex A8 as ARM keeps telling everybody :)
several years later, ARM calls up Intel and says, "um... you've been selling PXA SoCs for some time now, um... where's the source code?" and of course they replied, "oh, the ARM11 was so shit we ditched it and started again. we never actually made any modifications to the *ARM11* codebase, check the wording of the contract, bye, have a nice life".
the irony is that the PXA series was so much more powerful and so much more power-efficient than the Intel Atom processors available at the same time, the DEC/Alpha aka PXA team was PROHIBITED from releasing Intel PXA SoCs running above 600mhz.
of course when Marvell bought the PXA designs (minus the DEC/Alpha team that developed it), they made absolutely no changes whatsover: all they did was immediately crank the clock rate up to 1.2ghz and that's what you find in the OpenRD/Ultimate and the Sheeva Plugs.
ARM's *real* story is littered with embarrassing stumbles from one architectural mess to another. they've never *actually* designed a successful processor in their entire corporate history!
the ARM7 was a mess that LSI Logic had to diplomatically fix
the ARM9 was something that was developed by someone else and offered to them (i don't know its history).
the ARM11 was developed by a Kiwi who just turned up one day, no interview, nothing, just sat down at a desk and started working. when managers asked him if he actually wanted paying, he said, "no don't worry about it".
even the Cortex series was bought from a failed (independent) VC-backed firm that, due to patents and encryption, couldn't work out how to get THUMB interoperability.
it's a cluster-poop, completely different from the image of the "highly successful advanced innovative company" that they are today :)
of course *now* they can offer 7-figure US salaries and incentives to the India Shakti Team lead developer, but they certainly couldn't have done that even 10 years ago.
It will be interesting to see how the different initiatives (RISC-V, OpenPower, MIPS...) evolve to respond to openness concerns and the need to cultivate interest in their offerings more generally.
IBM and NXP/Freescale have to be much more careful. they are patent heavy-weights, and you've heard the phrase, "do not annoy the 800lb gorilla".
IBM takes its responsibility as a world-leader extremely seriously, and they're providing an extremely sneaky royalty-free patent license for POWER ISA, which says, "you get free unrestricted use of these patents as long as you don't ever try to assert a patent - ever - against us, IBM".
*that's* clever :)
l.
On Thu, Jan 02, 2020 at 12:28:03AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
IBM takes its responsibility as a world-leader extremely seriously, and they're providing an extremely sneaky royalty-free patent license for POWER ISA, which says, "you get free unrestricted use of these patents as long as you don't ever try to assert a patent - ever - against us, IBM".
*that's* clever :)
Aren't there similar terms in the GPL3? Except of course you get to use the software instead of any patents?
-- hendrik
On Thursday, January 2, 2020, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
On Thu, Jan 02, 2020 at 12:28:03AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
IBM takes its responsibility as a world-leader extremely seriously, and they're providing an extremely sneaky royalty-free patent license for POWER ISA, which says, "you get free unrestricted use of these patents as long as you don't ever try to assert a patent - ever - against us, IBM".
*that's* clever :)
Aren't there similar terms in the GPL3? Except of course you get to use the software instead of any patents?
i believe so. section 8 specifically mentions termination including patent grants.
however section 11 itself is dreadfully unclear.
l.
On Fri, 3 Jan 2020 00:13:16 +0800 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
On Thursday, January 2, 2020, Hendrik Boom hendrik@topoi.pooq.com wrote:
On Thu, Jan 02, 2020 at 12:28:03AM +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
IBM takes its responsibility as a world-leader extremely seriously, and they're providing an extremely sneaky royalty-free patent license for POWER ISA, which says, "you get free unrestricted use of these patents as long as you don't ever try to assert a patent - ever - against us, IBM".
*that's* clever :)
Aren't there similar terms in the GPL3? Except of course you get to use the software instead of any patents?
i believe so. section 8 specifically mentions termination including patent grants.
however section 11 itself is dreadfully unclear.
l.
IANAL, but when I read the GPL3 I thought it was only patents relating to the SW in question whereas the POWER ISA agreement was more along the lines of "no suing for infringement ever". As in, when you DL the GPL3 SW you can check if it infringes, if yes then sue, if no then you can use it and be bound to the GPL3. If they change the SW so that it infringes then you can sue (if you aren't using the new version).
Sincerely, David
On 2020-01-02 00:28, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
after they got the ARM7 functional, barry managed to get ARM their very first license, ever: with Plessey. they were so happy, they offered him a job. barry turned it down: he would have been employee number 12, and a very rich man, now :)
The Plessey connection is interesting to hear about. Of course, Plessey got merged into GEC which became GEC Marconi. Ultimately, Marconi, with the GEC assets stripped away and with the company focusing on the apparently successful telecoms equipment model that made Ericsson a lot of money, itself failed.
but ARM - aka ACORN RISC machines (not Advanced RISC Machines) - basically had zero cash, and at one point was completely unable to pay its employees (this is like... early 1990s). they licensed the ARM11 design to Intel for GBP 100,000, unrestricted, royalty-free, in exchange for a promise from the team that IBM had bought (the DEC Alpha developers), would "fix all the problems and give the changes back".
The story I have heard is that a DEC team did the StrongARM on their own initiative - not a surprising thing within DEC if you read about the different RISC initiatives within DEC in the 1980s and 1990s and all the corporate politics - doing so maybe without a licence and without ARM even knowing about it, and then they approached ARM afterwards. Whether that story is true or not, it effectively saved ARM's bacon. It certainly kept Acorn viable for another couple of years because their roadmap was running out of road, waiting for ARM800 or ARM810 CPUs which, in their envisaged form, probably never appeared. Also, the target frequency would have been modest compared to StrongARM, but that probably just shows what expertise DEC had accrued and applied when developing Alpha.
Probably the other understated development at that point in ARM's history was the introduction of the Cirrus Logic ARM7500 and ARM7500FE products which were the first ARM SoCs (as far as I am aware). A bunch of network computers and set-top boxes used those products, and they also kept Acorn going for some more time. The ARM7500FE also had hardware floating point arithmetic, unlike the StrongARM, and it was therefore still an attractive choice despite being clocked a lot slower than the StrongARM.
the DEC Alpha developers - whom Intel themselves didn't know what to do with, so gave them the PXA Project to do - took one look at the HDL and went "holy f*** this is s**t" and started again from scratch. they could do so because they had that GBP 100,000 royalty-free license from ARM, and the contract wasn't worded carefully enough.
thus, the PXA 2xx series became the world's first superscalar ARM-compatible architecture... *not* the ARM Cortex A8 as ARM keeps telling everybody :)
As far as I know the XScale and PXA product lines descend from StrongARM as a consequence of the bizarre and rather suspicious settlement between DEC and Intel where DEC supposedly won but ended up weakening its own position, probably hastening its acquisition by Compaq and the effective demise of various technologies like Alpha.
Paul
arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk
-
David Niklas -
Hendrik Boom -
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton -
Paul Boddie