ISAs are open sourced one after another. There are still hopes after the Huawei incident open source crisis

As a major driving force for the development of the technology industry, open source is particularly respected in emerging fields. RISC-V is undoubtedly one of the most popular new stars in the open source community in the past two years.

On July 10 this year, the RISC-V ecosystem reached another milestone when the RISC-V Foundation announced the approval of the RISC-V basic instruction set architecture and privileged architecture specifications.

RISC-V is developing rapidly, and the RISC-V camp is also constantly strengthening. On August 22, GigaDevice launched the first RISC-V core 32-bit general-purpose MCU, which became another important event for domestic RISC-V chips.

Of course, there is another open source event that is worth noting this week. IBM officially announced the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the high-performance CPU POWER processor as an open standard at the OpenPOWER Summit in San Diego, USA on Tuesday. In other words, the POWER instruction set is also open source.

Different paths lead to the same destination: there is a foundation behind open source ISAs

As RISC-V becomes popular, MIPS and POWER have successively become open source.

RISC-V is born with the attribute of open source, and the original non-open source MIPS and POWER have been open sourced one after another undoubtedly for a larger market share.

It is worth noting that RISC-V, MIPS, and POWER, which all have the same goal, all have a "foundation" behind them, and the foundations seem to have a "mission" to promote the application and ecological construction of the corresponding ISA.

Founded in 2015, the RISC-V Foundation is a non-profit organization managed by its members, dedicated to promoting the application and implementation of the free and open source RISC-V instruction set architecture. The RISC-V Foundation has been accompanying the growth of RISC-V, from being initially sought after by makers and engineers in the open source community to now absorbing many corporate members including mainstream companies such as Google, Qualcomm, Apple and Tesla.

When talking about the open source of MIPS and the foundation behind it, we need to start with the "milestone" event in 2018.

In June 2018, an artificial intelligence chip startup called Wave Computing acquired MIPS Technologies, a veteran in the processor business, with the aim of accelerating the development of AI technology through customized processors. In December of that year, Wave officially announced that it would open up the MIPS architecture. The MIPS Open Program will allow participants to freely access the "latest versions of 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS ISA - without licensing or royalties", and users will also have access to hundreds of patents owned by MIPS. In February 2019, Wave announced the establishment of the MIPSOpen Advisory Committee, which is open to manufacturers, partners, universities, and outstanding people in the technology field, and will lead MIPS open source community management, licensing models, working groups and other related matters.

It is reported that the committee will be incubated in the prpl Foundation and will be responsible for the management, licensing model, working groups and other related matters of the Wave Computing MIPS open source community.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is a strategic collaboration launched by IBM around POWER architecture products. It is committed to creating an open and equal cooperation platform for member companies, breaking the boundaries between software innovation and hardware innovation, and continuously promoting and encouraging members to conduct collaborative innovation based on the POWER architecture to meet the diverse business needs of many users.

With IBM's provision of the POWER ISA license to the OpenPOWER Foundation, developers can ensure the co-definition of hardware and software running on POWER.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is operated by the OpenPower Alliance. In August 2013, IBM, Google, NVIDIA, Mellanox and other companies jointly established the OpenPOWER Alliance, which is committed to opening up IBM's POWER series CPU architecture to the outside world to counter the increasingly powerful threats of X86 and Arm CPU systems.

It is worth noting that at the same time as IBM announced the open source of POWER, as part of the open source program, the OpenPOWER Foundation will also become a department of the Linux Foundation.

Are there successful open source communities behind successful open source projects? Are there successful foundations behind successful open source communities?

The answer may be yes.

Companies that compete with each other usually face huge obstacles in cooperating, and a neutral, non-competitive foundation will play an important role. Industry insiders said that many companies believe that they can work with other companies on open source projects through a trusted independent non-profit organization.

Reflections on the post-Huawei "open source crisis"

Although open source is borderless and has no national boundaries, in the Huawei incident, Google announced that it would stop providing technical support and services for the Android system. This "open source crisis" also caused an uproar in the domestic open source community.

It is undeniable that the vast majority of open source foundations and open source projects are located in the United States, and almost all open source licenses and code hosting platforms are dominated by American academia and industry.

Industry analysts pointed out that although open source foundations and open source licenses can allow open source projects that do not involve encryption functions to circumvent export controls, because code hosting platforms are subject to export controls, open source projects on these hosting platforms will still be affected by export controls.

In the past, Chinese users mainly used open source projects and made few contributions to the open source community. In recent years, the contribution of the domestic open source community to international open source projects has become increasingly noticeable, and domestic open source organizations are gradually coming to the stage. However, China's open source project hosting platform is still in its infancy, and there is a big gap with internationally renowned hosting platforms such as GitHub.

Many Chinese users have expressed their hope that China will also have an open source foundation and an active open source community that can influence the world and provide good support and services to global developers.

How far is the distance from expectation to reality?

The answer may not be far away.

On August 10, at the Songhu Dialogue session of the Huawei Developer Conference, Wang Chenglu, President of Huawei's Consumer BG Software Department, said that Huawei is discussing the China Open Source Foundation with major partners. The foundation will be officially operational in one or two months at the earliest. It is completely public welfare, non-profit and open. Huawei also explained that Hongmeng open source has many structures, and it is considered to be operated by the foundation. Huawei has no control or dominance in it.

In addition to ISA, there are more open source possibilities for integrated circuits

Recently, another open source event in the integrated circuit field that deserves attention is the domestic open source EDA initiative.

At the CCF Fault-Tolerant Computing Conference held in the middle of this month, the OpenBelt open source EDA framework initiative was proposed.

It is reported that OpenBelt is an open source EDA framework jointly initiated by Peking University, Institute of Computing Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University, Fudan University and other research advantage units in the EDA field. Its purpose is to build a new design methodology ecosystem and community that is independent, innovative, and meets the needs of chip design in the post-Moore era through the strength of the academic and industrial circles in the EDA field within the United Nations.

Unlike traditional software, open source EDA has its own difficulties. It is worth noting that public information shows that OpenBelt is a public domain concept rather than a specific project, and it needs to gather extensive forces from academia and industry to solve the problem. Currently, the Center for Energy Efficient Computing and Applications of Peking University is working on the construction of the preliminary framework of OpenBelt.