Straddling open source software and the hardware industry with Rob Taylor

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Rob Taylor, CTO/CSO and founder of ChipFlow. Although ChipFlow is unambiguously a software company, it creates software that facilitate the creation of semiconductors, so it straddles the software and hardware worlds.

Some of the things we talked about include:

• The state of open source in the semiconductor space, and why that matters. A large part of it is the high cost of proprietary software for chip design, and the fact that there are a lot of barriers to entry, both for the design software and to chip creation.
• Rob also talked about how an open source approach is the only way to bridge between research institutions and universities and the commercial world — too often, researchers would do brilliant work during a Ph.D. program and then it would be completely lost when they entered the commercial world.
• On the other hand, open source is little-known and mistrusted in the semiconductor space. Rob described it as a marketing liability, which is why it’s downplayed on the company webpage. —> I come across this more often than is often recognized inside the open source bubble.

It’s one thing to build an open source company in the software infrastructure space, where open source has a positive reputation and is often seen as simply table stakes; it’s quite another to build an open source company in a conservative industry where open source doesn’t have a positive image. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that this means you have to have a reason other than marketing to build and maintain the open source project.

Want to join others to talk about the challenges and opportunities in building open source companies? Join us at Open Source Founders Summit next spring in Paris.