The European Commission just published a 20MEur call for the development of open-source Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools:
The relevant part is on page 17 of "Annex 2, Appendix 6":
https://www.chips-ju.europa.eu/File/download.aspx?entity=shv_library&attribute=shv_file&ID=cc42159a-30ed-ef11-9341-7c1e5235a121
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.
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:
https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php?title=White_paper_for_the_EC,_January_2020
* In November 2023 we published a roadmap for the EC:
https://wiki.f-si.org/index.php?title=Recommendations_and_roadmap_for_the_development_of_open-source_silicon_in_the_EU
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:
https://fossi-foundation.org/resources/eu-roadmap
The call says that "this roadmap should be considered in proposals".
This roadmap recommends "OSI-approved licences" (ignoring the #FSF) 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.
@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