I found the commenter who posed this as a response to RISC-V interesting. The University of California at Berkeley has a completely public implementation, under the BSD license, without patents filed, which your effort appears to be positioned against.

It is a time-limit on damages, which is not the same thing as a time limit on lawsuits. There is still the potential to restrain an infringer who started 6 or more years ago from further infringement through the courts - and totally kill their business - even though damages for the infringement can not be recovered. And you can sue any other infringer.

Check out My Gate Array Project if you haven't already done so. The EE work is done by Chris Testa KD2BMH, I mostly do systems programming and business but do a lot of design checks, etc.

Repeating the AC because he's posted at karma 0. That's "University of California at Berkeley", AC, but the rest of this is spot on:

Berkeley University is pushing really hard to get universities to adopt RISC-V (an Open ISA and set of cores) as a basis for future processor and architecture research. The motivation behind RISC-V was to have a stable ISA that isn't patent encumbered, isn't owned by one company, and is easily extensible (OpenRISC didn't fit the bill here).

I can see that ARM and MIPS would have a problem with this, especially as there is nothing particularly innovative or performance gaining about either ISA, and some recent RISC-V cores have demonstrated similar performance to some recent ARM cores in half the area. This is there way of fighting back against something open that stands to lose them significant marketshare.

Cool. Someone found us the agenda!

I get paid to train EEs within large companies on intellectual property issues, and to help the companies and their attorneys navigate those issues. Infringement is rife within software companies. Not because anyone wants to infringe, but because of a total lack of due diligence driven by ignorance.

You've made my point for me.

And any informed patent holder knows that any violation must be prosecuted, or the validity of the patent evaporates.

No, that's just the ignorance of the uninformed that "everybody knows", but it's wrong. You don't lose your patent from failing to enforce it. You might be confusing it with trademarks, which can go into the public domain if you allow them to become generic terms rather than specific brands. And you can sometimes lose the capability of being able to enforce against a specific infringer if you hold back until the market develops, that's the Doctrine of Laches. But you don't lose your patent. Nor would you lose your copyright due to failure to enforce.

you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

It's very common these days for companies to allow universities to use their technology at the cost of tying the company into the university's patent revenue. And of course this is often publicly-funded research, so not only is the taxpayer paying for the development of patents used to sue that same taxpayer, the patents go directly to a company from academia.

The net effect is to feed intellectual property centered companies at the expense of the technology sector in general and small technology companies in particular.

"Neonicotinoids in bees: a review on concentrations, side-effects and risk assessment"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

"Many lethal and sublethal effects of neonicotinoid insecticides on bees have been described in laboratory studies, however, no effects were observed in field studies with field-realistic dosages."

As they say there's need for further study regarding synergistic effects and the like. But real exposure effects in the field are what counts, not just laboratory findings. Otherwise it's like finding that table salt is OMG-toxic as studied in the lab, even tho we know it's safe in normal realworld use.

Honeybees are technically an invasive species in North America; they were imported, not native. There are numerous other species, including small native bees, that did the pollination work before honeybees came along. Far as I have heard, populations of these native bees have not been affected by CCD.

Neonicotinoids are relatively expensive (4 years ago, Imidacloprid was $25/pound, about 5x the cost of permethins), and I'd guess despite being about a quarter of the insecticide market, that in ag they are probably not used outside of the fairly limited areas that grow fruits and vegetables -- as those crops have a better profit margin. Yet CCD has been seen very widely, including in areas where there isn't any row-crop agriculture.

Anecdotally, I've used Imidacloprid to control desert stink beetles, and did not observe any issues with my wild honeybees (who frequented the same areas, cuz that's where the water was).

The scare over DDT was manufactured. Silent Spring (which I read, back when it was new) was mostly fiction and has been discredited, yet it influenced a whole generation of environmentalism -- that, not truth, was its point and intent. Some estimates put malaria deaths due to ending use of DDT in the millions. Meanwhile, the connection with condor populations was at best tenuous.