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The guys at opencores.org (now owned and maintained by ORSoC) are asking for donations to help develop an full open source SoC based on the OpenRISC architecture. What does the SemiWiki community think about this ?
My personal 2 cents on this topic. I am interested in open source EDA and also IP so I think this may be a good start. Some of question I still have is:
- For what exactly will this money be used ? e.g. will it be used for paying engineers, EDA tools licensing and/or for production of the chips itself.
- Who owns the money ?
- I would like to see that part of the effort also goes to lowering the needed NRE costs in the future for new designs like for example open source EDA tool flow, open source standard cell library, shared mask costs, ...
Don't understand me wrong, I am not against open source IP; on the contrary. All I want to say is that I would prefer that a non-profit organization would lead the project. The setup of the organization leading an open source project is as important as the license of the source itself. The examples you give are all lead by non-profit organizations or even a community of developers. (CentOS is maybe an exception as it is derived from the Linux of a commercial company - Red Hat).