There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any open-source sense as far as I can tell.
Further, membership is expensive and representation on the "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals like Claire Wolf & whitequark).
Finally, quoting from the press release:
> The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open source tools
But the github is empty except for a singular project that just links to work done before the formation of this entity?
So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that already exist:
- The Skywater Slack
- The Symbiflow Slack
- The YosysHQ Slack
- #openfpga & #symbiflow on freenode
- The 1BitSquared Discord