@Pyrrho @lanodan @niconiconi

> I made a post about RISC-V a while ago, about how China lets its citizens relicense GPL code, and how RISC-V will be no different.

Yeah, they're not big on following copyright law. (I'm not either.) I don't think there's much licensing encumbrance with RISC-V, though and if you make some sort of proprietary extension to RISC-V, what's it get you? It's an ISA. You'd have to ship chips that have the extension, and ship enough of them that the extension matters enough to alter the compilers to take advantage of it, etc. It's not like shipping a set-top box with no kernel source: attempting an ISA extension doesn't have legs.

I don't really like the ISA but a lot of my objections were related to no one actually using it. I actually love ARM (the ISA and the chips, not the company).

> I still think it's cool, but I don't want it enough to support harming the west. Same reason I still buy Intel; I want fabs here.

Intel is "harming the west" if we're going to introduce broad social concerns into hardware discussions. They're the Microsoft of chipfab: maximum proprietary lockdown, NSA backdoors, suing competitors into the ground if they can't win, suing them into the ground even when they could win, then doing the same shit they sued to prevent. Unfortunately, there are no good chip companies. Sam Zeloof is doing home chipfab ( http://sam.zeloof.xyz/category/semiconductor/ ): you could do that, or you could start up your own company and sell chips, or you could buy chips from Satan. I'm not happy about it, but I'm running with the devil for now.

But that's a completely different discussion from cross-compilers and ISAs and "Hey, look, here's a new thing using the weird chip, someone's attempting to make a giant workstation." I think, in general, it's worse for society to make more conversations about broader social concerns or politics. Too much stuff is about broader social concerns and politics.