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Comment by Nullabillity | Hacker News Reader

> So far our patent experience has been excellent. We have successfully refuted all the prior art cited by the Examiners. While we have rephrased our applications to suit the Examiner in several cases, the substance of our claims have been allowed without exception. The Mill is truly novel – and we now have the USPTO imprimatur to confirm that.

So it won't be useful for another 20ish years. Yay?

> It will, naturally enough, break. However, by hosting it ourselves we can capture what failed, and use that as raw feed for our test/debug team.

Wow, this is gettting more and more depressing.

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Here’s a team of world-class experts who have spent 10+ years of their lives completely redesigning all the parts of the CPU from scratch, along with a completely new low-level software stack on top of it. They’ve taken no salaries during that time.

If they had no chance of any reward for their efforts, but expected their decades of work to make some already wealthy chip vendors a bit richer, you think they would bother?

This kind of thing is the best possible use of the patent system: it’s supporting extremely novel and creative technical invention and engineering, not preventing anyone else’s work (nobody was intending to make anything remotely similar), and putting the details of the new inventions into the public sphere for anyone’s study now and free use in 20 years.

To make use of these inventions requires billions of dollars of capital investment in chip fabrication infrastructure. Anyone with serious intentions can approach the Mill people and ask to license their technology.

>team of world-class experts who have spent 10+ years of their lives completely redesigning all the parts of the CPU from scratch, along with a completely new low-level software stack on top of it. They’ve taken no salaries during that time.

reminds me of gimp, or emacs

Except for, you know, the main part of your quote: "completely redesigning all the parts of the CPU from scratch, along with a completely new low-level software stack on top of it."

Hardware is harder than software.

Not asking this rhetorically; how is it that RISC-V, also a major hardware development effort, was able to get a lot more done (including commercial chip production) in a lot less time (~6 years) without being patent-encumbered?

These projects have completely different scope. Wikipedia on RISC-V:

> The designers claim that new principles are becoming rare in instruction-set design, as the most successful designs of the last forty years have become increasingly similar. Most of these that failed, failed because their sponsoring companies failed commercially, not because the instruction-sets were technically poor. So, a well-designed open instruction set designed using well-established principles should attract long-term support by many vendors.

* * *

> Not asking this rhetorically

It’s hard to take your comment seriously, since you don’t seem to understand what the Mill people are trying to do (even in basic concept, i.e. rethinking the entire design of the CPU).

I recommend you watch a few of Ivan Godard’s lectures. That will give you a much better idea than reading discussion here.

I've been reading the mill papers for the last few years, and I'm still not sure why they haven't done even a basic PoC in the 10+ years they've been working on this.

This is an example of patents being used the way they were intended. Not all patents are bad you know. The world is shades of grey, not black and white as children see it.

Sorry, but children do not see the world in black and white, not literally nor in terms of good/bad. Some people seems to divide the world around them like that, but it has nothing to do with age.

If you want to get pedantic I'll revise that too young children typically have a simplistic world view where things are either good or bad. I'm all too aware that many adults are like that as well, but it's a childish attitude that speaks very poorly of them. I also expect that kind of attitude is negatively correlated with IQ, but have no evidence to back that up.

I don't think it would ever ship if it wasn't patented. It makes it considerably easier to obtain funding.

Frankly, I'd rather have it one product not ship at all than have it prevent other people from working in the area.

You can work in the same area, you just can't sell the exact same thing. From your comments, it seems like you have no problem working for free, so what's the issue?

Not sure about the patent stuff, but "cloud"-only compiler hosting is an absolute show-stopper for me.

That's only while it's in development. Obviously, once ready, the toolchain will be available publicly. They can't release it now, though, because not all of their patents have been accepted.

> We plan to host a complete Mill development environment in the cloud for public use. It will, naturally enough, break. However, by hosting it ourselves we can capture what failed, and use that as raw feed for our test/debug team. This will give us much better feedback than releasing a SDK for user’s own machines, because users rarely take the trouble to file bug reports.

It seems like they're doing that now mainly to get better feedback. I can't imagine that rationale would make as much sense once their stuff is more stable.

At a minimum, you'd need to spend a stack of cash verifying that the EULA of the cloud compiler didn't include a "ALL UR INVENTIONS ON THIS ARE BELONG TO US" clause - would be only prudent given how intent the company is on planting its flag in IP.

Such paranoia is amply justified in our industry. However I expect that we will continue our iconoclastic approach to legalisms so long as the founders keep control. Our model for our cloud software follows the example pioneered by Greg Comeau; you can see his at http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout/.

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