As someone pretty integrated with open source hardware, this initiative weirds me out.
There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any open-source sense as far as I can tell.
Further, membership is expensive and representation on the "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals like Claire Wolf & whitequark).
Finally, quoting from the press release:
> The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open source tools
But the github is empty except for a singular project that just links to work done before the formation of this entity?
So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that already exist:
Still early days, but I disagree with some of your assertions. Seems to be a bit of an echo chamber in osh these days...
The effort was not created in vacuum.
-The skywater effort sits on top of darpa's openroad (I am currently on the board and so is serge)
-Prof Gaillardon and Xifan created the "openfpga" open source generator and taped out a skywater and 12nm (see woset best paper) [edit: and they are the founders of osfpga]
-Vaughn Betz created VTR which symbiflow is based on.[edit: and he is on the board]
-Yosys/Claire has done amazing work but it was possble thanks to Alan Mishchenko's ABC. De Michelli and Gaillardon have similar package to ABC that is definitely worth a look.
-The fees seem to be in line with other organizations, chips alliance, riscv foundation, etc.
I'm familiar with the OpenFPGA stuff but hadn't connected it to the folks listed -- consider this an ask to have bios on the site as I evidently picked the wrong people to google. It's great to know there's more than meets the eye here beyond a vague press release I can't make heads or tails of.
Looking at other hardware-related foundations (like the RISC-V foundation) there are explicit callouts for "individuals not representing a legal entity," which is where someone like myself would fit, but the bucketing on OSFPGA makes it seem like people in this group who are not students (for example, me, not that I'm particularly special) don't have a place here. (As an aside, I dislike how many orgs collapse members and sponsors into one thing, but that's neither here nor there).
Finally, I didn't mean to imply that the work I mentioned came whole cloth from the respective author's heads. Sorry if what I wrote conveyed that.
There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any open-source sense as far as I can tell.
Further, membership is expensive and representation on the "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals like Claire Wolf & whitequark).
Finally, quoting from the press release:
> The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open source tools
But the github is empty except for a singular project that just links to work done before the formation of this entity?
So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that already exist:
- The Skywater Slack
- The Symbiflow Slack
- The YosysHQ Slack
- #openfpga & #symbiflow on freenode
- The 1BitSquared Discord