Linux Foundation: More on CHIPS Alliance and Community Bridge'
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CHIPS Alliance to Create Open Chip Design Tools for RISC-V and Beyond
The Linux Foundation and several major RISC-V development firms have launched an LF-hosted CHIPS Alliance with a mission “to host and curate high-quality open source code relevant to the design of silicon devices.” The founding members -- Esperanto Technologies, Google, SiFive, and Western Digital -- are all involved in RISC-V projects.
On the same day that the CHIPS Alliance was announced, Intel and other companies, including Google launched a Compute Express Link (CXL) consortium that will open source and develop Intel’s CXL interconnect. CXL shares many traits and goals of the OmniXtend protocol that Western Digital is contributing to CHIPS (see farther below).
The CHIPS Alliance aims to “foster a collaborative environment that will enable accelerated creation and deployment of more efficient and flexible chip designs for use in mobile, computing, consumer electronics, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.” This “independent entity” will enable “companies and individuals to collaborate and contribute resources to make open source CPU chip and system-on-a-chip (SoC) design more accessible to the market,” says the project.
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The Linux Foundation's CommunityBridge platform
The Linux Foundation has announced a new initiative called CommunityBridge; its purpose is to help with funding and support for open-source developers. It includes some security-related services and a means for connecting developers with mentors. The program is in an "early access" mode for now.
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Understanding LF's New 'Community Bridge'
Yesterday, the Linux Foundation (LF) launched a new service, called 'Community Bridge' -- an ambitious platform that promises a self-service system to handle finances, address security issues, manage CLAs and license compliance, and also bring mentorship to projects. These tasks are difficult work that typically require human intervention, so we understand the allure of automating them; we and our peer organizations have long welcomed newcomers to this field and have together sought collaborative assistance for these issues. Indeed, Community Bridge's offerings bear some similarity to the work of organizations like Apache Software Foundation, the Free Software Foundation (FSF), the GNOME Foundation (GF), Open Source Initiative (OSI), Software in the Public Interest (SPI) and Conservancy. People have already begun to ask us to compare this initiative to our work and the work of our peer organizations. This blog post hopefully answers those questions and anticipated similar questions.
The first huge difference (and the biggest disappointment for the entire FOSS community) is that LF's Community Bridge is a proprietary software system. Section 4.2 of their Platform Use Agreement requires those who sign up for this platform to agree to a proprietary software license, and LF has remained silent about the proprietary nature of the platform in its explanatory materials. The LF, as an organization dedicated to Open Source, should release the source for Community Bridge. At Conservancy, we've worked since 2012 on a Non-Profit Accounting Software system, including creating a tagging system for transparently documenting ledger transactions, and various support software around that. We and SPI both now use these methods daily. We also funded the creation of a system to manage mentorship programs, which we now runs the Outreachy mentorship program. We believe fundamentally that the infrastructure we provide for FOSS fiscal sponsorship (including accounting, mentorship and license compliance) must itself be FOSS, and developed in public as a FOSS project. LF's own research already shows that transparency is impossible for systems that are not FOSS. More importantly, LF's new software could directly benefit so many organizations in our community, including not only Conservancy but also the many others (listed above) who do some form of fiscal sponsorship. LF shouldn't behave like a proprietary software company like Patreon or Kickstarter, but instead support FOSS development. Generally speaking, all Conservancy's peer organizations (listed above) have been fully dedicated to the idea that any infrastructure developed for fiscal sponsorship should itself be FOSS. LF has deviated here from this community norm by unnecessarily requiring FOSS developers to use proprietary software to receive these services, and also failing to collaborate over a FOSS codebase with the existing community of organizations. LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin has said that ?wants more participation in open source -- to advance its sustainability and -- wants organizations to share their code for the benefit of their fellow [hu]mankind?; we ask him to apply these principles to his own organization now.
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