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Comment by gsmadhusudan | Hacker News Reader

On the contrary, we started Shakti because our lab can track technology faster than a commercial outfit ! I am an ex-industry architect and a startup CEO who came back to academia started this effort because the pvt sector was moving too slowly wrt CPU research and deployment. Done well govt entities can move really fast once you figure out how to deal with bureaucracy. And we can dream way bigger.

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I agree, having worked in the American national lab system I can say that government research can easily keep pace with industry. Especially in risky or inherently costly industries, I'd argue that government funded research labs that work in collaboration with industry and academia are possibly the best equipped.

Thank you for the effort to free knowledge.

That is a compliment I will gladly accept. Look I come from a long line of theologians and philosophers dating back a millenia plus . The Indian ethos of not charging for knowledge has prevailed this long and I am not about to break a tradition ! It is not that we are averse to the ways of capitalism, folks from my family have funded and run some of the biggest tech startups in the valley. I have also run startups earlier and am incubating a couple now. So I know what free money implies. But the core ethos of Shakti is openness and that will never change. See my other effort - finlibre.org. Open source in banking and insurance.

I hold that there is no incompatibility between charity and capitalism. The market is an emergent behaviour of the personal desires and values of individuals. There's nothing anti-market about wanting to contribute to a public good voluntarily, nor to taking work that is ideologically more attractive to you (even at reduced pay).

It is not charity. Computing has become a public infrastructure like roads and water supply. So it is by nature a public good. The underlying foundation has to be based on the principle of the commons and not controlled by one entity. In processors just an ISA will not do, there needs to be open and state of the art implementations at every segment. That is the goal of Shakti. For example We also have GPS/NAVIC receivers and LTE modems in the works. Our comm research groups are far large than our compute groups, so no manpower shortage. They in fact came up with a short lived WiMax like standard which saw wide deployment via IIT incubated startups.

We shall see. Free money has hidden costs.

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