In a new front in the U.S.-China tech war, President Joe Biden's administration is facing pressure from some lawmakers to restrict American companies from working on a freely available chip technology widely used in China - a move that could upend how the global technology industry collaborates across borders.

So the US wants to ban US companies from working with the Chinese on Risc-V technology. I believe this is the reason why the RISC-V Foundation based itself in Switzerland, to avoid the US government from interfering with the spirit of open source. Your thoughts?

    • OtterEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      “I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed,” Warner said in a statement to Reuters.

      huh, well that’s not something I’ve had to think about before.

      Edit:

      I guess this a matter of what precedent is set, and limiting this kind of talk to a few distinct areas.

      It would be AWFUL for so many sectors if we start placing blockers on open collaboration and access to information. A non-tech example might be health research where sometimes limits make sense (ex. Independent research on diseases, when something has the potential to be weaponized), but for the most part there’s so much good that comes from open collaboration.

      There’s this feeling that’s sometimes pushed where “conflict is inevitable”, but it’s… not? It’s harder to work towards something together, and defaulting to conflict is the lazy way out.

  • partial_accumenEnglish
    13•1 year ago

    I think we’re all tired of paying for proprietary CPU designs when those rights holders can make it cheap to begin with, and then when it is established jack the price up or sell the IP to another organization which bleeds us dry.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The lawmakers expressed concerns that Beijing is exploiting a culture of open collaboration among American companies to advance its own semiconductor industry, which could erode the current U.S. lead in the chip field and help China modernize its military.

    Such calls to regulate RISC-V are the latest in the U.S.-China battle over chip technology that escalated last year with sweeping export restrictions that the Biden administration has told China it will update this month.

    U.S. persons should not be supporting a PRC tech transfer strategy that serves to degrade U.S. export control laws," Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement to Reuters.

    McCaul said he wants action from the Bureau of Industry and Security, the part of the Commerce Department that oversees export-control regulations, and would pursue legislation if that does not materialize.

    “I fear that our export-control laws are not equipped to deal with the challenge of open-source software - whether in advanced semiconductor designs like RISC-V or in the area of AI - and a dramatic paradigm shift is needed,” Warner said in a statement to Reuters.

    The RISC-V technology came from labs at the University of California, Berkeley, and later benefited from funding by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

    The original article contains 840 words, the summary contains 212 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!