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The European Commission just published a 20MEur call for the development of open-source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools:

ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tend

The relevant part is on page 17 of "Annex 2, Appendix 6":
chips-ju.europa.eu/File/downlo

The first deadline is on April 29. In case of interest contact us -we will help you to get in touch with the forming Consortia.

@fsi Imagining this is all because of one person getting so fed up with OrCAD they got themselves into public office to fix that shit

This 20MEur call follows years of lobbying the European Commission (EC) for open-source support:

* In January 2020 we published recommendations for the EC about Free and Open-Source (FOS) Silicon Hardware:
wiki.f-si.org/index.php?title=

* In November 2023 we published a roadmap for the EC:
wiki.f-si.org/index.php?title=

This EU call refers to the following roadmap which was coordinated by the FOSSi foundation, an entity which received money from Google and big-EDA:
fossi-foundation.org/resources

The call says that "this roadmap should be considered in proposals".

This roadmap recommends "OSI-approved licences" (ignoring the ) and hints to a "permissive development model".
We strongly disagree with promoting permissive licences in all situations because they may enable unsustainable exploitation scenarios:

For example, permissive licences would allow big-EDA to "steal" the best open-source projects and to sell their programs without releasing the source.

Some popular permissive licences, moreover, don't contain any "patent clause" making them dangerous in the chip/hardware context: Tracking which IP went in which chip is relatively simple, and replacing a certain IP once a chip is fabricated is impossible. Without a "patent clause" developers could be easily threatened for patent infringement. 

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