The question is whether anyone is commercially interested anymore. Funded as an AI startup and lacking customers, the last thing Wave's backers want is IP they can't unload for dollars, which may explain why Wave CEO Art Swift was pushed out after four months. Even less clear is what prompted the withdrawal, but the most likely theory is Wave is planning to put MIPS up for sale. Meanwhile, clearly Wave doesn't want people to realize what's happened, given how delayed the news has been and how little announcement they themselves have made. And the free VHDL implementation Microwatt is just a Github clone away. More importantly, now that OpenPOWER is part of the Linux Foundation IBM can't backtrack even if they wanted to (and it's pretty clear they're happy with the response to OpenPOWER so far). For OpenPOWER, however, all an implementor has to do is meet the specification and obey the trademark requirements. MIPS Open had a more legally problematic licensing structure called 'open use' which only allowed registered participants to develop under the MIPS Open Architecture 1.0 license, requiring prior approval and developers under the MOA-1 license 'to provide upon request by MIPS or its authorized MIPS Open Verification Partner, information demonstrating that such implementation in its current format is a MIPS Open CERTIFIED Independent Core.' No community governance existed and anecdotal reports circulated that gaining access to critical developer resources was arduous and bureaucratic.

It's debatable how open MIPS Open Initiative really was, compared to, say, OpenPOWER (or RISC-V or OpenSPARC). Indeed, the new sign up page simply 404s, though as of this writing the GNU tools downloads are still up. Despite the happy talk still up on the main site, and no sign of public notification, Hackster is reporting that Wave Computing has terminated the offering with an extract from a legal letter stating it became effective on November 14. Less than a year after it launched, the MIPS Open Initiative has apparently terminated. I won't be offended at all if someone beats me to the punch especially as I'm starting to see WebAssembly becoming a hard dependency even for some add-ons (without the JIT there is no support for wasm).

Unfortunately I have not had time to do much more work on the JIT because of the holidays, family responsibilities and $DAYJOB. As a result I will be doing smoke test builds about every 10-14 days to ensure early regressions on Power are intercepted. This is the last of the 6-week sprints, moving to a 4-week cadence for Firefox 72. However, this looks like a general Linux issue on all architectures.) The configurations I am using are unchanged from Firefox 67. Apparently the extensions I'm using are unaffected by bug 1601424. It pretty much works as is on Power ISA and I've noticed no new issues with it so far. Firefox 71 is out, not a major system upgrade, but some nice milestones such as improved developer tools, support for Media Session and native MP3 decoding.

Krita keeps crashing 3.11