Lots of developers really want to learn Go, a programming language for large systems created by Google, meanwhile most developers are sick of attending meetings, and most of those working at multinational corporations aren't happy there. From a report: That's according to the results of a survey of over 16,655 developers from 76 countries carried out by HackerEarth, a company with offices in India and San Francisco that provides tools for recruiters to remotely assess developer coding skills. Go comes out top of the languages most developers want to know. The survey finds that 32% of experienced developers pick Go as the programming language they want to learn, well ahead of Python, which 24% say they want to learn. The desire for learning Go lines up with the results of a similar survey by remote developer hiring firm HackerRank. Go is used at Google, Netflix, American Express, Salesforce, IBM, Target, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, and Dropbox.

Steve Denning was director of knowledge management at the World Bank from 1996 to 2000, and now consults with organizations around the world on management and innovation. And in 2018 he wrote the book The Age of Agile. Now he's arguing in Forbes that "As the global coronavirus crisis is forcing many organizations to act with unaccustomed speed, organizational agility has suddenly become a necessity.

"The crisis is also making obvious that institutional agility means much more than having lots of agile teams scattered around the organization." "To create a truly agile enterprise," as the article, "The Agile C-Suite", by Bain consultants Darrell K. Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez in the May-June 2020 issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR) points out, "the top officers — most, if not all, of the C-suite — must embrace agile principles too." Agility of course isn't new. What's new is to see the C-suite embracing it.

The contrast in stock market performance between firms that have been embracing Agile principles at the senior level for a number of years — such as Microsoft and Amazon — and two firms that have spurned Agile principles at the senior level — such as GE and IBM — is dramatic...

It is important that Harvard Business Review is highlighting the role of the C-suite in business agility. Wall Street has already got the message. Although the U.S. economy shrank at a 4.8% annual rate in the first quarter and suffered from 30 million unemployment claims, the stock market finished its best month in years. Why? The answer to the paradox is simple. After a devastating collapse the previous month, investors poured into the "chosen few." Firms that have demonstrated business agility by taking advantage of technological possibility — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — have become the largest and fastest growing organizations in the world, while many others struggle.

"Two research groups say they've independently built quantum devices that can operate at temperatures above 1 Kelvin — 15 times hotter than rival technologies can withstand," reports IEEE Spectrum. (In an article shared by Slashdot reader Wave723.)

"The ability to work at higher temperatures is key to scaling up to the many qubits thought to be required for future commercial-grade quantum computers..." HongWen Jiang, a physicist at UCLA and a peer reviewer for both papers, described the research as "a technological breakthrough for semiconductor based quantum computing." In today's quantum computers, qubits must be kept inside large dilution refrigerators at temperatures hovering just above absolute zero. Electronics required to manipulate and read the qubits produce too much heat and so remain outside of the fridge, which adds complexity (and many wires) to the system...

"To me, these works do represent, in rapid succession, pretty big milestones in silicon spin qubits," says John Gamble, a peer reviewer for one of the papers and a senior quantum engineer at Microsoft. "It's compelling work...." Moving forward, Gamble is interested to see if the research groups can scale their approach to include more qubits. He's encouraged by their efforts so far, saying, "The fact that we're seeing these types of advances means the field is progressing really well and that people are thinking of the right problems."
Besides Microsoft, Google and IBM have also "invested heavily in superconducting qubits," the article points out. And there's also a hopeful comment from Lee Bassett, a physicist focused on quantum systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "Each time these silicon devices pass a milestone — and this is an important milestone — it's closer and closer to the inflection point.

"This infrastructure of integrated, silicon-based electronics could take over, and this technology could just explode."

Paul Cormier became Red Hat's new CEO this week -- while the entire company was working from home. He had to make his inaugural address to over 12,000 employees around the world using BlueJeans videoconferencing tools, reports a North Carolina newspaper: In some ways, Red Hat was well prepared to work through the disruptions of coronavirus. For years, the company has encouraged and accepted employees who have wanted to work from home. It's been a big part of its recruiting efforts, Cormier said. "Especially in engineering, our strategy has always been hire the best person, we don't care where they are."

That doesn't mean it has been unscathed. The company has had to change its sales and product conference this year into a virtual event and social isolation obviously puts a strain on relationships with customers. And while the company wouldn't give out an exact number of employees who have be infected by COVID-19, a spokeswoman for Red Hat said, "We have cases around the globe -- people who are presumed to be sick, people who are sick and, happily, people who have recovered."

Cormier said he's committed to taking care of the thousands of employees affected by work-from-home orders across the globe. Red Hat, he said, will pay all of its employees during this time regardless of whether "you're 140% productive or 40% productive."
Cormier also emphasized he's committed to keeping Red Hat a "totally, totally separate company" from IBM, saying that was agreed upon from the beginning with IBM's new CEO Arvind Krishna. "If we're not independent, then the other cloud guys won't feel safe working with us... Intel, for example, shares their road map, which is super top secret, with us five years in advance, because we have to build the OS to support all their features...." He also noted that Red Hat's finance, legal, communications and human resources teams are all separate from IBM. "IBM doesn't set our road map. We set our road map," he said.

Where the company has seen a lot of success together, though, is in combining sales efforts. In its last earnings call, IBM said Red Hat was seeing an increase in large deals worth more than $10 million after joining IBM. One of them was with Verizon, for example.

As millions file for unemployment benefits in the United States every week, states' aging computer systems simply cannot keep up. States like New Jersey and Connecticut have said they are desperate for programmers who are still familiar with COBOL, a programming language that debuted in 1960 and is still used in critical computer systems like unemployment databases and banks. But there aren't many who know COBOL programming anymore. IBM, the leading provider of mainframes typically used to compile and run COBOL code, is trying to help bridge that gap. From a report: On Friday, IBM announced it was launching a free training program to teach coders COBOL as well as new forums to match those who know the language with those who need help maintaining their critical systems. The COBOL course will teach coders how to use the language in Microsoft's popular VSCode software and will be available next week. Next month, IBM says it will release a more fully fledged video COBOL course on online learning platforms like Coursera. The two forums that IBM has launched live on the Linux Foundation's Open Mainframe Project website. One of the forums, Calling all COBOL Programmers, has had dozens of engineers sign up in the last 24 hours from around the world. The other forum is more technical in nature, where coders can pose specific COBOL questions and work through projects with experts.

The Pentagon is teaming up with some of the biggest names in tech to combat hacks designed to mess with the automated systems we'll rely on in the near future. From a report: In February, DARPA issued a call for proposals for a new program. Like most DARPA projects, it had a fantastic acronym: Guaranteeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Robustness against Deception (GARD). It's a multimillion-dollar, four-year initiative that's aiming to create defenses for sensor-based artificial intelligence -- think facial recognition programs, voice recognition tools, self-driving cars, weapon-detection software and more. Today, Protocol can report that DARPA has selected 17 organizations to work on the GARD project, including Johns Hopkins University, Intel, Georgia Tech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, SRI International and IBM's Almaden Research Center. Intel will be leading one part of the project with Georgia Tech, focusing on defending against physical adversarial attacks. Sensors that use AI computer vision algorithms can be fooled by what researchers refer to as adversarial attacks. These are basically any hack to the physical world that tricks a system into seeing something other than what's there.

Digital Trends reports: IBM's question-answering Watson A.I. is most famous for whooping the butt of human champions on quiz show Jeopardy. Now, IBM has repurposed its famous creation to help government agencies, health care organizations, and academic institutions around the world cope with the massive overload of questions that citizens have about the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is the first time that Watson has been used to help in a pandemic scenario.

A coronavirus-focused version of the Watson A.I. has been called into service as a virtual agent in places including Arkansas, California, Georgia, New York, and Texas in the United States, as well as the Czech Republic, Greece, Poland, Spain and U.K. It is capable of answering locally relevant questions, ranging from those about coronavirus symptoms and testing specifics to queries on things like social distancing. These consistent and accurate responses can be provided to citizens via voice calls or text chat...

Watson Assistant for Citizens pulls data from a range of external sources — local, national, and international.
Digital Trends got an interesting response from one consultant at IBM Watson Health who's an expert on digital health for the World Health Organization. "Our team is currently adding responses to psychological questions, by which a virtual nurse can help people to deal with their fears and emotional problems and provide comfort to them in these times."

"The Eclipse Foundation just released version 1.0 of an open-source alternative to Visual Studio Code called Eclipse Theia," reports SD Times: Theia is an extensible platform that allows developers to create multi-language cloud and desktop IDEs, allowing them to create entirely new developer experiences.

According to the Eclipse Foundation, the differences between Theia and Visual Studio Code are that Theia has a more modular architecture, Theia was designed from the ground to run on desktop and cloud, and Theia was developed under community-driven and vendor-neutral governance of the Eclipse Foundation. The Theia project was started by Ericsson and TypeFox in 2016, and since then it has become an integral part of cloud solutions globally. The project approached the Eclipse Foundation about becoming a potential host in 2019.

Early contributors to the project include ARM, Arduino, EclipseSource, Ericsson, Google Cloud, IBM, Red Hat, SAP, and TypeFox.
"We are thrilled to see Eclipse Theia deliver on its promise of providing a production-ready, vendor-neutral, and open source framework for creating custom and white-labeled developer products," announced Mike Milinkovich, the Eclipse Foundation's executive director. "Visual Studio Code is one of the world's most popular development environments. Not only does Theia allow developers to install and reuse VS Code extensions, it provides an extensible and adaptable platform that can be tailored to specific use cases, which is a huge benefit for any organization that wants to deliver a modern and professional development experience. Congratulations to all the Theia committers and contributors on achieving this milestone."

InfoWorld points out that "thus far Theia is intended to be fitted into third-party products. An end-user version is on the roadmap for release later this year."

But programming columnist Mike Melanson notes that "Chances are, you've already run into Theia without even realizing it, as it already serves as the basis for Red Hat's CodeReady Workspaces, the Eclipse Foundation's own Eclipse Che, and Google Cloud Shell."

Last week long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely predicted "the death of IT" in 2020 due to the widespread adoption of SD-WAN and SASE.

Now he's predicting "an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever," including IT consultants and contractors. My IT labor death scenario now extends to process experts (generally consultants) being replaced with automation. In a software-defined network, whether that's SD-WAN or SASE, so much of what used to be getting discreet boxes to talk with one another over the network becomes a simple database adjustment. The objective, in case anyone forgets (as IT, itself, often does) is the improvement of the end-user experience, in this case through an automated process. With SD-WAN, for example, there are over 3,000 available Quality of Service metrics. You can say that Office 365 is a critical metric as just one example. Write a script to that effect into the SD-WAN database, deploy it globally with a keyclick and you are done...

It's slowly dawning on IBM [and its competitors] that they have to get rid of all those process experts and replace them with a few subject matter experts. Here's the big lesson: with SD-WAN and SASE the process no longer matters, so knowing the process (beyond a few silverbacks kept on just in case the world really does end) isn't good for business.
Cringely predicts the downgrading of corporate bonds will also put pressure on IBM and its competitors, perhaps ultimately leading to a sale or spin-off at IBM. "Either they sell the parts that don't make money, which is to say everything except Red Hat and mainframes, or they sell the whole darned thing, which is what I expect to happen."

With that he predicts thousands of layoffs or furloughs — and while the bond market puts IBM in a bigger bind, "this could apply in varying degrees to any IBM competitors."

HPE announced on Tuesday it's working with Intel and the Linux Foundation on a new open source software project to help automate the roll out of 5G across multiple sites. From a report: The new partnership, which will be under the Linux Foundation umbrella, is called the Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Framework. The partnership represents HPE's move into the 5G core network space as it branches out from its enterprise roots. Other partners for the open source project include AMI, Apstra, IBM's Red Hat, Tech Mahindra and World Wide Technology. HPE will also introduce an enterprise offering, the HPE Open Distributed Infrastructure Management Resource Aggregator.

The state of New York hopes to "amplify" its response to COVID-19 by launching tech-driven products with top companies, and it's looking for professional volunteers with experience in software development, hardware deployment/end-user support, and data science (as well as areas like product management, design, operations management).

Meanwhile, IBM's 2020 "Call for Code Global Challenge" is a virtual hackathon with a $200,000 prize, and they've now "expanded its focus" to include the effects of COVID-19.

Tech columnist Mike Melanson writes: But this is just the beginning of the COVID-19 hackathon boom, which now includes efforts organized by tech giants, state governments, and grassroots initiatives alike. For example, the World Health Organization got together with technology companies and platforms such as AWS, Facebook, Giphy, Microsoft, Pinterest, Salesforce, Slack, TikTok, Twitter and WeChat to launch the COVID-19 Global Hackathon 1.0, which is running as we speak with a deadline for submissions of March 30th at 9 AM PST. If you're too late, fret not, for there are many more, such as the CODEVID-19 hackathon we mentioned last week that has a weekly rolling deadline. And deadlines aside, the U.S. Digital Response for COVID-19 is working to pair technology, data, and government professionals with those who need them, in a form of nationwide, technological mutual aid...

[T]he COVID-19 open-source help desk is "a fast-track 'stack overflow' where you can get answers from the very people who wrote the software that you use or who are experts in its use." And if you happen to be either an open source author or expert, feel free to pitch in on answering questions...

On the open data side of things, for example, GitHub offers a guide on open collaboration on COVID-19, while StackOverflow looks at the myriad ways to help the fight against COVID-19 from home. ProgrammableWeb has a list of developer hackathons to combat COVID-19, and even the Golang team offers some guidance for Go, the Go community, and the pandemic, with Erlang also joining in.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Speech recognition systems from five of the world's biggest tech companies -- Amazon, Apple, Google, IBM and Microsoft -- make far fewer errors with users who are white than with users who are black, according to a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The systems misidentified words about 19 percent of the time with white people. With black people, mistakes jumped to 35 percent. About 2 percent of audio snippets from white people were considered unreadable by these systems, according to the study, which was conducted by researchers at Stanford University. That rose to 20 percent with black people.

The study, which took an unusually comprehensive approach to measuring bias in speech recognition systems, offers another cautionary sign for A.I. technologies rapidly moving into everyday life. The Stanford study indicated that leading speech recognition systems could be flawed because companies are training the technology on data that is not as diverse as it could be -- learning their task mostly from white people, and relatively few black people. [...] The best performing system, from Microsoft, misidentified about 15 percent of words from white people and 27 percent from black people. Apple's system, the lowest performer, failed 23 percent of the time with whites and 45 percent of the time with black people.

Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he's learned about working remotely: Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."

Of course, just saying "'don't be social' isn't much of a great tip, is it?" Nor, as many extroverts are now finding out, is working from home necessarily at all comfortable. So, Torvalds suggests that you take "advantage of the 'real' upside of working from home: flexibility... Torvalds says, "if you make your new life a '9-5, but from home' kind of thing, I think you're just going to hate your home, yourself and your life. All the downsides, none of the upsides...." He believes that instead of using "video conferencing instead to recreate exactly what we used to do before, you should" try to really change how you work. Use asynchronous communication models: messaging, email, shared calendars, whatever.
Torvalds also recommends carefully tracking the things that you need to do, but argues that if you're spending hours in online meetings from home instead of hours in real-world meetings, "you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse..."

And the article also includes some tips from James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and senior Linux kernel developer who works closely with Torvald. For videoconferencing Bottomley uses NextCloud Talk and Zoom, which he calls a "horrible proprietary app" -- but notes that it does have binaries for every Linux distro.

Slashdot reader Willy English quotes CNBC: AT&T is asking all of its employees who have the ability to work remotely to do so until further notice, as the coronavirus spreads across the globe.

The company will be announcing new procedures and safeguards for employees who can't work from home, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said in a note sent to employees Friday. AT&T is one of the largest employers in the United States, and has 245,000 global employees.
Meanwhile, a local U.S. news station reports: IBM is encouraging all employees in the United States to work from home through the end of March, if possible.

In an email sent to employees and provided to KIMT, the technology company says the recommendation is in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.

Ars Technica's senior tech reporter took a long long at Google's reimplementation of Java in Android -- and the lawsuit filed against it by Oracle in 2010. And he discovers "a possible downside" to Oracle's stance on API copyrights. If anyone should understand the importance of such copying, it's Oracle. After all, Oracle got its start in the 1970s selling a database product based on the then-new structured query language (SQL). SQL was invented by IBM. And Oracle doesn't seem to have gotten a license to use it...

Oracle's copying of SQL seems pretty similar to Google's copying of Java. But an Oracle spokeswoman disagrees. "It's an incorrect premise, comparing apples with broccoli, and being completely divorced from the facts of the case," she wrote in a Tuesday email.

America's Supreme Court will soon decide whether Google infringed on a copyright that Oracle says it holds on the APIs of Java. But this week Oracle's executive vice president also wrote a blog post arguing that Google "sought the support of outside groups to bolster its position" by using friend-of-the-court briefs to "create the impression that this case is of great import and controversy, and a ruling in Oracle's favor will impede innovation."

"Upon closer inspection, what these briefs reveal is a significantly different picture, one where Google is the outlier, with very little meaningful support outside the purview of its financial fingerprints." As we discussed in a previous post, this case is not about innovation, it is about theft. Google copied verbatim more than 11,000 lines of software code, and now attempts post hoc to change the rules in order to excuse its conduct... As those of us that have watched Google over the past few decades know, Google's view boils down to the self-absorbed position that the work it is doing is of such consequence that the rules shouldn't apply to them. The problem for Google is that very few outside of its self-generated atmosphere agree.

Let's be clear, it is not commonplace or foundational in the software industry to steal other developer's software code. Rather, what is commonplace is a confluence of interests where code is licensed to facilitate its widespread deployment, with the owner choosing the terms... Java embraced choice, with three different licensing alternatives, including a freely deployed open source license, and a commercial license designed to maintain interoperability. And it turns out that nobody except Google found it necessary to steal despite Java's enormous popularity. It is not in dispute in this matter that Google destroyed Java interoperability so it is unbelievable that many of its amici take the position that Google needs to prevail in order to protect interoperability...

Out of 26 briefs, we found:

- 7 briefs representing 13 entities that received "substantial contributions" from Google;

- 8 briefs filed by entities or individuals that have financial ties to Google through grants, dues, cy pres settlement proceeds or employment of individual amici;

- 2 briefs filed by companies with a clear commercial interest in Google prevailing;

- 1 brief filed by several former U.S. government employees all of whom worked for a small government agency run by a former Google executive, despite the U.S. government itself filing a brief in favor of Oracle;

- 4 separate briefs representing a total of 7 individuals;

- A few other briefs where Google financial ties are likely;

- 1 brief submitted by a serial copyright infringer repeatedly sanctioned by the Courts;

What masqueraded as a mass show of support for Google, may not be much more than an exercise in transactional interests.
The groups Oracle is criticizing include the American Library Association, EFF, and the Python Software Foundation, as well as a brief by 83 computer scientists which included Doug Lea, a former memeber of the executive committee of the Java Community Process. Oracle's blog post also makes the argument that besides Microsoft and IBM, "not a single brief from the other 98 of the Top 100 tech companies was filed."

There was a response on Twitter from Joshua Bloch, who worked on the Java platform at Sun before leaving in 2004 to become Google's chief Java architect for the next 8 years. He called Oracle's blog post "nonsense." For example, Doug Lea -- who is in no small measure responsible for Java's success -- accepted one small grant from Google fourteen years ago, and promptly doled it out to deserving undergrads who were testing java.util.concurrent. Have you no shame, Oracle?

We are not Google shills. We are scientists and engineers. Some of us laid the theoretical groundwork for the profession, some designed the computers you grew up on, and some wrote the software you use every day.

We depend on the right to reimplement each others' APIs, and we are truly afraid that your irresponsible lawsuit may deprive us of that right, which we've enjoyed throughout our long careers.

IBM is taking Airbnb to court over what it claims is the illegal use of four patents -- the latest in a string of suits against online companies involving historic and arguably broad innovations -- in a move that threatens to cast a shadow over the short-term rental company's road to a proposed IPO. From a report: The computing giant has accused Airbnb of "building its business" by using patents relating to functions such as "presenting advertising in an interactive service" and "improved navigation using bookmarks." "After almost six years of unsuccessful discussions with Airbnb to reach a fair and reasonable patent licence agreement, we had no alternative but to file legal action to protect our intellectual property rights," IBM said. "Airbnb has chosen to ignore our patents and use our technology without compensation."

"Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate at Intel's Security Day that promised a future with Full Memory Encryption but began with Intel SGX (launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015).

Salter describes SGX as "one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves." SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU -- and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself. As a result, even someone with root (system administrator) access to the running system can't usefully read or alter SGX-protected enclaves. This is intended to allow confidential, high-stakes data processing to be safely possible on shared systems -- such as cloud VM hosts. Enabling this kind of workload to move out of locally owned-and-operated data centers and into massive-scale public clouds allows for less expensive operation as well as potentially better uptime, scalability, and even lower power consumption.

Intel's SGX has several problems. The first and most obvious is that it is proprietary and vendor-specific -- if you design an application to utilize SGX to protect its memory, that application will only run on Intel processors... Finally, there are potentially severe performance impacts to utilization of SGX. IBM's Danny Harnik tested SGX performance fairly extensively in 2017, and he found that many common workloads could easily see a throughput decrease of 20 to 50 percent when executed inside SGX enclaves. Harnik's testing wasn't 100 percent perfect, as he himself made clear -- in particular, in some cases his compiler seemed to produce less-optimized code with SGX than it had without. Even if one decides to handwave those cases as "probably fixable," they serve to highlight an earlier complaint -- the need to carefully develop applications specifically for SGX use cases, not merely flip a hypothetical "yes, encrypt this please" switch....

After discussing real-world use of SGX, Rao moved on to future Intel technologies -- specifically, full-memory encryption. Intel refers to its version of full-memory encryption as TME (Total Memory Encryption) or MKTME (Multi-Key Total Memory Encryption). Unfortunately, those features are vaporware for the moment. Although Intel submitted an enormous Linux kernel patchset last May for enabling those features, there are still no real-world processors that offer them... This is probably a difficult time to give exciting presentations on Intel's security roadmap. Speculative prediction vulnerabilities have hurt Intel's processors considerably more than their competitors', and the company has been beaten significantly to market by faster, easier-to-use hardware memory encryption technologies as well. Rao and Woodgate put a brave face on things by talking up how SGX has been and is being used in Azure. But it seems apparent that the systemwide approach to memory encryption already implemented in AMD's Epyc CPUs -- and even in some of their desktop line -- will have a far greater lasting impact.

Intel's slides about their own upcoming full memory encryption are labeled "innovations," but they look a lot more like catching up to their already-established competition.

IBM and Microsoft have signed an "ethical resolution" with the Vatican to develop AI in a way that will protect the planet and the rights of all people [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: The pledge, called the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," will be presented on Friday morning to Pope Francis by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft, and John Kelly, IBM's executive vice-president, as well as Vatican officials and Qu Dongyu, the Chinese director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The two US tech companies lead the world in AI development, measured by the number of patents they have amassed. The document calls for AI to safeguard the rights of all humankind, particularly the weak and underprivileged, and for new regulations in fields such as facial recognition. It said that there must be a "duty of explanation" that would show not only how AI algorithms come to their decisions but also what their purpose and objectives are.

The CEO of the RISC-V Foundation (a former IBM executive) touted the open-source CPU architecture at this year's HiPEAC conference, arguing there's "a growing demand for custom processors purpose-built to meet the power and performance requirements of specific applications..." As I've been travelling across the globe to promote the benefits of RISC-V at events and meet with our member companies, it's really stuck me how the level of commitment to drive the mainstream adoption of RISC-V is like nothing I've seen before. It's exhilarating to witness our community collaborate across industries and geographies with the shared goal of accelerating the RISC-V ecosystem...With more than 420 organizations, individuals and universities that are members of the RISC-V Foundation, there is a really vibrant community collaborating together to drive the progression of ratified specs, compliance suites and other technical deliverables for the RISC-V ecosystem.

While RISC-V has a BSD open source license, designers are welcome to develop proprietary implementations for commercial use as they see fit. RISC-V offers a variety of commercial benefits, enabling companies to accelerate development time while also reducing strategic risk and overall costs. Thanks to these design and cost benefits, I'm confident that members will continue to actively contribute to the RISC-V ecosystem to not only drive innovation forward, but also benefit their bottom line... I don't have a favorite project, but rather I love the amazing spectrum that RISC-V is engaged in — from a wearable health monitor to scaled out cloud data centres, from universities in Pakistan to the University of Bologna in Italy or Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, from design tools to foundries, from the most renowned global tech companies to entrepreneurs raising their first round of capital. Our community is broad, deep, growing and energized...

The RISC-V ecosystem is poised to significantly grow over the next five years. Semico Research predicts that the market will consume a total of 62.4 billion RISC-V central processing unit (CPU) cores by 2025! By that time I look forward to seeing many new types of RISC-V implementations including innovative consumer devices, industrial applications, high performance computing applications and much more... Unlike legacy instruction set architectures (ISAs) which are decades old and are not designed to handle the latest workloads, RISC-V has a variety of advantages including its openness, simplicity, clean-slate design, modularity, extensibility and stability. Thanks to these benefits, RISC-V is ushering in a new era of silicon design and processor innovation.
They also highlighted a major advantage. RISC-V "provides the flexibility to create thousands of possible custom processors. Since implementation is not defined at the ISA level, but rather by the composition of the system-on-chip and other design attributes, engineers can choose to go big, small, powerful or lightweight with their designs."