[OpenRISC] De-coupling OpenRISC from OpenCores

[Christian Svensson]

Hi.

I know this is an area of deep political arguments, but this will be about
how I think it's time to get rid of the dependency on OpenCores.

I joined OpenRISC a few years ago and I have never been affiliated with
another project on OpenCores, nor have I ever been paid by a company to do
anything OpenRISC or OpenCores related. I'm just an open-source developer
that hated what happened to SourceForge and has also happened to OpenCores.

As I see it, OpenCores is a platform that receives little to no new
features and downtime hits productivity hard. That the donation page for a
now de-funct ASIC project is still up and collecting money, and that the
page has ads doesn't help me like the platform.

Today I forked ~800 cores to Github.under the organisation FreeCores:
https://github.com/freecores
This removes the dependency on OpenCores and allows free hosting of the
source code.

When it comes to the portal:
I have started to gather Wiki information and assembling it on
http://bluecmd.github.io/
This is still a work in progress, but the end result is a Git repository
that allows anyone to submit a pull request to change the website - I think
that the low wiki activity makes this feasible.

Finally: The mailing lists
I would love it if we could kill the opencores.org mailing list and just
use the openrisc.net one.
I never understood the reason to have both, even after reading the old
discussions. Ideally we would just extract the subscriber list, add the
ones who are not on the openrisc.net one and be done with it.

I can pull a lot of this myself, but I need to know I have support by the
community.

Sorry if I stomp on toes by doing this, but I feel like the world has
progressed in infrastructure but we have not.

Regards,
Christian

[Jose Teixeira de Sousa]

I support this!

Jose

Post by Christian Svensson
Hi.
I know this is an area of deep political arguments, but this will be about
how I think it's time to get rid of the dependency on OpenCores.
I joined OpenRISC a few years ago and I have never been affiliated with
another project on OpenCores, nor have I ever been paid by a company to do
anything OpenRISC or OpenCores related. I'm just an open-source developer
that hated what happened to SourceForge and has also happened to OpenCores.
As I see it, OpenCores is a platform that receives little to no new
features and downtime hits productivity hard. That the donation page for a
now de-funct ASIC project is still up and collecting money, and that the
page has ads doesn't help me like the platform.
https://github.com/freecores
This removes the dependency on OpenCores and allows free hosting of the
source code.
I have started to gather Wiki information and assembling it on
http://bluecmd.github.io/
This is still a work in progress, but the end result is a Git repository
that allows anyone to submit a pull request to change the website - I think
that the low wiki activity makes this feasible.
Finally: The mailing lists
I would love it if we could kill the opencores.org mailing list and just
use the openrisc.net one.
I never understood the reason to have both, even after reading the old
discussions. Ideally we would just extract the subscriber list, add the
ones who are not on the openrisc.net one and be done with it.
I can pull a lot of this myself, but I need to know I have support by the
community.
Sorry if I stomp on toes by doing this, but I feel like the world has
progressed in infrastructure but we have not.
Regards,
Christian
_______________________________________________
OpenRISC mailing list
http://lists.openrisc.net/listinfo/openrisc

[Christian Svensson]

(I moved the github page to http://openrisc.github.io to be clearer)

On Thu, Jul 17, 2014 at 10:48 PM, Jose Teixeira de Sousa

Post by Jose Teixeira de Sousa
I support this!
Jose

Post by Christian Svensson
Hi.
I know this is an area of deep political arguments, but this will be about
how I think it's time to get rid of the dependency on OpenCores.
I joined OpenRISC a few years ago and I have never been affiliated with
another project on OpenCores, nor have I ever been paid by a company to do
anything OpenRISC or OpenCores related. I'm just an open-source developer
that hated what happened to SourceForge and has also happened to OpenCores.
As I see it, OpenCores is a platform that receives little to no new
features and downtime hits productivity hard. That the donation page for a
now de-funct ASIC project is still up and collecting money, and that the
page has ads doesn't help me like the platform.
https://github.com/freecores
This removes the dependency on OpenCores and allows free hosting of the
source code.
I have started to gather Wiki information and assembling it on
http://bluecmd.github.io/
This is still a work in progress, but the end result is a Git repository
that allows anyone to submit a pull request to change the website - I think
that the low wiki activity makes this feasible.
Finally: The mailing lists
I would love it if we could kill the opencores.org mailing list and just
use the openrisc.net one.
I never understood the reason to have both, even after reading the old
discussions. Ideally we would just extract the subscriber list, add the ones
who are not on the openrisc.net one and be done with it.
I can pull a lot of this myself, but I need to know I have support by the
community.
Sorry if I stomp on toes by doing this, but I feel like the world has
progressed in infrastructure but we have not.
Regards,
Christian
_______________________________________________
OpenRISC mailing list
http://lists.openrisc.net/listinfo/openrisc

--
Jose T. de Sousa, PhD
Office: [phone]
R. Alves Redol 9
1000-029 Lisboa
Portugal

[Jeremy Bennett]

Post by Christian Svensson
Hi.
I know this is an area of deep political arguments, but this will be
about how I think it's time to get rid of the dependency on OpenCores.

Hi Christian,

I'd be very careful about going down this route. We go through the agony
of forking every few years, and then find we have forked the community.

The last time there were some reasonable gripes (lack of git support,
lack of mailing lists). But it divided the community and led to a lot of
upset. A few years before that a group split off to form BA Semi, and we
now see the problems there as we try to upstream GCC, and find that some
of that group were contributors.

Post by Christian Svensson
I joined OpenRISC a few years ago and I have never been affiliated with
another project on OpenCores, nor have I ever been paid by a company to
do anything OpenRISC or OpenCores related. I'm just an open-source
developer that hated what happened to SourceForge and has also happened
to OpenCores.

But this is a diverse community. Some of us do use OpenRISC for living
(we were paid for the GCC 4.5.1 work). But that revenue allows Embecosm
to sponsor ORConf - like lots of open source companies we do give back.

OpenCores problem has always been a lack of revenue. It is why Damjan
sold the website to ORSoC AB several years ago. And ultimately the
support they can give depends on the revenue they get.

Post by Christian Svensson
As I see it, OpenCores is a platform that receives little to no new
features and downtime hits productivity hard. That the donation page for
a now de-funct ASIC project is still up and collecting money, and that
the page has ads doesn't help me like the platform.

Those are fair complaints, but the approach would be to talk to ORSoC
AB. I remember the horror of the 18 months before ORSoC AB stepped in.
The website was always down, and the website was completely unusable.
You may not like ads, but they do pay for the servers and some maintenance.

Post by Christian Svensson
Today I forked ~800 cores to Github.under the organisation
FreeCores: https://github.com/freecores
This removes the dependency on OpenCores and allows free hosting of the
source code.

Are you going to keep them in sync? Did you ask the project managers of
those 800+ cores if they thought this was a good idea. I know many of
them are dead projects (as are many on GitHub, and on SourceForge), but
there are also some that are not, even if they are not projects you use.

What about the discussion forums (including the non-OpenRISC ones). Are
you migrating those as well? That is often where the beginners first
come in.

Post by Christian Svensson
I have started to gather Wiki information and assembling it
on http://bluecmd.github.io/
This is still a work in progress, but the end result is a Git repository
that allows anyone to submit a pull request to change the website - I
think that the low wiki activity makes this feasible.

I don't want to submit a pull request that relies on someone else to
decide. I want a wiki which I can edit. If you don't like the current
wiki, just edit it.

Post by Christian Svensson
Finally: The mailing lists
I would love it if we could kill the opencores.org
<http://opencores.org> mailing list and just use the openrisc.net
<http://openrisc.net> one.
I never understood the reason to have both, even after reading the old
discussions. Ideally we would just extract the subscriber list, add the
ones who are not on the openrisc.net <http://openrisc.net> one and be
done with it.

I think you should regard this experience as a warning. We have two
mailing lists, because at the time of the last split the two mailing
list providers could not come to an agreement to merge. So we now have
to post to both, because the membership lists are not the same. Having
chaired two ORConf discussions trying to resolve this, we have now just
given up.

I can easily see this becoming a *third* mailing list.

Post by Christian Svensson
I can pull a lot of this myself, but I need to know I have support by
the community.

Don't underestimate the work required for a community of this size. Just
looking at the OpenCores OpenRISC mailing list since last October, there
have been around 450 posts, with 42 different contributors, most of whom
are multiple contributors. At the same time there have been 220 forum
posts, from another set of contributors.

It seems that we currently have OpenRISC hosted on GitHub, which gives
the version control the community desires. Do we really need to split
everything else off and do it for every project. GitHub for hosting
repos is good. Its website/wiki stuff is so-so. Its issue tracking is a
nightmare for any project with more than 100 lines of code.

And is this really what you want to do? Surely your interest is in
engineering.

Post by Christian Svensson
Sorry if I stomp on toes by doing this, but I feel like the world has
progressed in infrastructure but we have not.

I guess having been through this twice before, I really don't want to
face the pain. Could I suggest you at least hold fire until ORConf when
you can talk to all the main OpenRISC contributors.

That gives time to discuss what the solution to the obsessive desire of
OpenRISC to implode on a regular basis is. I am not convinced that
another individual splitting off a fork is going to be any happier
experience than the last two efforts.

It may be time to go down the route I have long advocated, which is a
proper community organization, not controlled by any one individual.
Given ORSoC AB have changed their CEO in the last year or so, you might
even find they would back this now. The advantage of a properly
constituted community organization is that you are much more likely to
persuade corporate sponsors to support you.

Best wishes,


Jeremy

[Christian Svensson]

Hi

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Jeremy Bennett

Post by Jeremy Bennett
The last time there were some reasonable gripes (lack of git support,
lack of mailing lists). But it divided the community and led to a lot of
upset. A few years before that a group split off to form BA Semi, and we
now see the problems there as we try to upstream GCC, and find that some
of that group were contributors.

I'm not trying to alienate anybody. Honestly, it might be too early to
say this but I don't see this being a problem.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
But this is a diverse community. Some of us do use OpenRISC for living
(we were paid for the GCC 4.5.1 work). But that revenue allows Embecosm
to sponsor ORConf - like lots of open source companies we do give back.

Of course, I'm not debating that. I love that people work with
OpenRISC and are part of the community, I'm just stating that I don't
have chain of command or financial interest to do this - I do it
because I believe it's the right thing and will help the project move
forward.
Please don't think I don't approve of people earning money by using OpenRISC.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
OpenCores problem has always been a lack of revenue. It is why Damjan
sold the website to ORSoC AB several years ago. And ultimately the
support they can give depends on the revenue they get.

That might have been true in the past, but I know there are better
ways to tackle this today. Crowd funding and donations comes to mind.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
Those are fair complaints, but the approach would be to talk to ORSoC
AB. I remember the horror of the 18 months before ORSoC AB stepped in.
The website was always down, and the website was completely unusable.
You may not like ads, but they do pay for the servers and some maintenance.

I would love to see some receipts or books that tell me that this is the case.

[Jeremy Bennett]

On 22/07/14 19:58, Christian Svensson wrote:

<snip>

Hi Christian,

Thanks for the comments. I suggest that for now detailed discussion is
probably not particularly helpful - it is heading down pretty much the
same track as few years ago.

The OpenRISC organisation is "owned" by a couple of active
maintainers. I think that's the best solution. Having a real corporate
entity "own" stuff just makes it harder. It might be useful if it
comes to actually seek funding, but I would vote for always have the
control in the community, never a formal organisation in a single
country. That is however I think a separate topic.

openrisc.net is owned by Jonas Bonn. He is the guy responsible for
OpenRISC Linux. Its ongoing development depends on how much time he has
available for it and the degree to which he wishes to stay involved.

Now you will be the person running everything.

Ownership by individuals accountable only to themselves is never
sustainable, not matter how pure and saintly that individual is. Which
is why every major FOSS project in the world has some form of community
foundation with a clear legal framework. Such a framework is essential
if you ever want any funding.

Now for ORSoC.
Is this still the name of the company? orsoc.se just redirects to
kncminer.com. All older orsoc.se links I find are gone, including
documentation that was once available. Any attempt I've made to
contact the maintainers of OpenCores (which I assume is ORSoC) has
remain unanswered. Someone is probably still moderating the forum, but
that's as far as it goes for life signs. I feel very uneasy about
this.

openrisc.org is owned by ORSoC AB, which was originally a general
electronics design house focusing on OpenRISC based developments. KNC
Miner is a JV with Kennemar & Cole AB to build bitcoin mining hardware,
and from what I understand ORSoC is putting its effort exclusively into
this now.

You should contact Marcus Erlandsson, CTO and founder (of both
organizations). In the first instance try KNC Miner's number +46 8559
253 20.

For what it's worth, I've been contacted by numerous people off-list
that think this is a great idea but asked to be anonymous.

Why do they need to remain anonymous - surely there is nothing to hide
about want a reorganization of a community project. The major
contributors (people like Julius, Stefan, Olof etc) have never been shy
of making their views well known.

I appreciate your input as always Jeremy, and you have much more
experience with the community in these matters - but I think the
current approach is trying too hard to please everyone and ends up
going nowhere.

The current approach is working reasonably well. I'm just trying to stop
another screw up that loses us good contributors yet again. I'll just
stand back and hope the fallout won't be so bad this time.

But if it would help, do feel free to discuss with me by telephone.

Best wishes,


Jeremy

[Christian Svensson]

Hi,

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Jeremy Bennett

Post by Jeremy Bennett
openrisc.net is owned by Jonas Bonn. He is the guy responsible for
OpenRISC Linux. Its ongoing development depends on how much time he has
available for it and the degree to which he wishes to stay involved.

(To be fair: I have not discussed this with Jonas yet, so he might be
against this - but the idea is still valid.)
Which is part of the problem. I personally hate to be in the critical
path of stuff, and I believe in empowering people.
Having the website's DNS point to GitHub's Pages would allow anyone
with commit access to github.com/openrisc to update the website
themselves = less time spent doing administrative stuff.

I didn't know ORSoC owned openrisc.org - that would be very nice to
use. I'll shoot the registar an email.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
Now you will be the person running everything.

See previous comment, initially I'll be the 'guru' of the system, but
since this allows self-service changes with only a pull request
signoff to deploy it - I think this is _less_ work for all parties.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
Ownership by individuals accountable only to themselves is never
sustainable, not matter how pure and saintly that individual is. Which
is why every major FOSS project in the world has some form of community
foundation with a clear legal framework. Such a framework is essential
if you ever want any funding.

Maybe, I have too little experience here. But I don't think this is
relevant to this move.
The GitHub OpenRISC organization has 6 owners who are all equal when
it comes to permissions.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
openrisc.org is owned by ORSoC AB, which was originally a general
electronics design house focusing on OpenRISC based developments. KNC
Miner is a JV with Kennemar & Cole AB to build bitcoin mining hardware,
and from what I understand ORSoC is putting its effort exclusively into
this now.
You should contact Marcus Erlandsson, CTO and founder (of both
organizations). In the first instance try KNC Miner's number +46 8559
253 20.

Why should I need to? Where I stand it's clear that they have made their choice.
If the company thinks it's OK to alienate the community and just wipe
their existence off the planet, I'm not going to chase them.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
Why do they need to remain anonymous - surely there is nothing to hide
about want a reorganization of a community project. The major
contributors (people like Julius, Stefan, Olof etc) have never been shy
of making their views well known.

I don't know, and I don't question - that these people who contacted
me feel they want to do a +1 anonymously speaks a bit on how political
and non-pragmatic this community can be at times.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
The current approach is working reasonably well.

By which measurement? Why settle and stop improving?

Post by Jeremy Bennett
I'm just trying to stop
another screw up that loses us good contributors yet again. I'll just
stand back and hope the fallout won't be so bad this time.

Again, I don't see how this would be the case. Contributions happen to
our github projects, to the wiki and to the arch spec.
If you want to change the portal page on the wiki, this would require
a bit more effort (this page has had 2 edits over the last 6 months
btw).
If you want to submit a new arch specification that would be to github
instead of SVN.

Post by Jeremy Bennett
But if it would help, do feel free to discuss with me by telephone.

I feel like email fits the purpose better and allows everyone to
follow our discussions and jump in if they feel like it.

Regards,
Christian

[Stefan Wallentowitz]

Hi all,

that was a burst of discussion and I understand both talking points. The
opencores website is a mess, I just started some editing in the Wiki to
just get stuff straight and even if you know the project the style of
the site makes it hard to get the information..

I am with Jeremy with respect to discussing this at the weekend of
ORCONF. I would not do it as a regular session but prior or after the
conference (Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon).
Any opinions?

See you,
Stefan