Do we need an organization to manage the ForwardCom project?
Such an organization could help people get involved, organize online meetings and conferences, facilitate research projects, develop standards, etc.
The idea of an organization came up as I was trying to find a solution to the problem of copyright ownership. Right now, I am the sole owner of the copyright (or should we call it copyleft?) of both hardware and software in the ForwardCom project. But if multiple contributors claim copyright on each their part of the code, then it will be difficult to make legal decisions. And what will happen when I die? There will be nobody to enforce the open license conditions. I think it will be better if an organization holds the copyright of all the code.
What are the alternatives? If we do nothing, there will soon be different pieces of code owned by different contributors and it will be very difficult to unite all the contributors if any legal decision is required.
The organization opencores.org is a hosting service and community for open source hardware projects. I don't think it is geared to hold any intellectual property rights. There is not much activity on opencores.org so I don't want to rely on this organization outliving me.
Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization that holds the copyright of many open source software projects. They are able to enforce the free license conditions, which may be important. But apart from that, I don't think they can bring much value to the project.
What are the RISC-V people doing? RISCV.ORG is organizing communities and conferences and promoting the project, but I don't think they are unifying copyright ownership.
Should we build a ForwardCom organization?
Moderator: agner
Re: Should we build a ForwardCom organization?
I have been thinking on your question a bit.
At this stage, there's only a few people working on the project, so there isn't much pressure to create a dedicated organization for it.
However, especially the copyright part is an important argument. Having an organization owning the code would allow less legal problems as a consequence of collaboration. I agree that the Software Freedom Conservancy might not be the best fit, since the scope of ForwardCom is a bit more extensive than a pure open source software project.
I am not sure how RISC-V handles the organizational part. As for copyright, their repositories have different licenses stating different authors. Their released specification also states individual authors.
Having a dedicated organization will get more important as more people get involved and the usability of the instruction set architecture increases. I believe compiler support to be an important step towards this.
At this stage, there's only a few people working on the project, so there isn't much pressure to create a dedicated organization for it.
However, especially the copyright part is an important argument. Having an organization owning the code would allow less legal problems as a consequence of collaboration. I agree that the Software Freedom Conservancy might not be the best fit, since the scope of ForwardCom is a bit more extensive than a pure open source software project.
I am not sure how RISC-V handles the organizational part. As for copyright, their repositories have different licenses stating different authors. Their released specification also states individual authors.
Having a dedicated organization will get more important as more people get involved and the usability of the instruction set architecture increases. I believe compiler support to be an important step towards this.