OPENCORES.ORG

As I understand it you are proposing a thought experiment.

Hi Richard,
  When was the last time you read all of GCC code ? Or Python ?
Or Perl ? Or Apache ? I can keep going....

  It's all open source, and unless you don't have any real work to do
you'll sit down and read the thousends line of code that hundreds of 
people wrote.

  I think open source is not the answer to blind faith. Most programmers
relay in one way or another in other programmers work, with blind faith.
The faith disappears when things go bad.

  This is the same for EDA tools, FABs, and ASIC design companies. You can
either accept it or not. The fact is that there's very little you can do to
change it.

  A typical NIC card has one ASIC, doing all the logic processing, from 
receiving the packet to transferring it over the PCI bus. It has at least 100K
transistors, do you feel like looking at them one by one through a microscope
to make sure they are all doing what they suppose to do ?

  Reverse engineering can be done, it usually takes months to find the 
interesting part, and then to understand what it's doing and how it's doing it.
The result is obviously nice to have, but will you recover the cost ? Unless
you are a big companey, with patents on some pieace of code, and you think
an infringment is happening, you have no way to do it.

  To conclude, I think that open source EDA tools is nice, but in reality most
of the participant in this list, are either working for EDA companey, 
electronics engineers or students, for good EDA tools that can compete with 
commercial ones, you need a lot of know-how, and a good background. It's
a lot harder to design and write then a new window manager or a new shell for
windows. The problems are at a different scale, and most of the code is 
propriatry and not accessible. This makes the task very hard and you need very
dedicated people to do that, espacially because the community is not as large.

  Erez.

--- Richard Stallman <rms@g...> wrote:
>     As I understand it you are proposing a thought experiment.
> 
> Absolutely not.  I suggested a method of verification in hope that it
> may be of direct practical use, sooner or later.
> 
>     Yes, when we trust neither the tools, the code, the fab line, or
>     the design, but all the parties who contribute them.
> 
> That is not a solution; we cannot assume that everyone we deal with is
> honest.  One of the benefits of free software is that we need not
> assume this.  We can see the results of other people's work; we are
> not constrained to depend on blind faith.  It will be a problem, in
> the future, if we are constrained to placing blind faith in chip
> fabricators.  Blind faith is not the solution, it is the problem.
> 
> Some are arguing that it would be unfeasible for them to modify the
> chip design they are sent.  If that is sufficient to avoid depending
> on blind faith, that's good.  My suggestion is available in case it
> helps.
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