Add blog post about who are maintainers.

Author: davidchisnall

_posts/2024-11-01-cheriot-administration.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title:  "Who controls the CHERIoT project? (or: CHERIoT is not WordPress)"
+date:   2024-11-01
+categories: govenance organisation
+author: "David Chisnall"
+---
+
+If you're a keen follower of open-source drama, you'll have seen that a disagreement between the maintainer of the WordPress open-source project and one of the large WordPress hosting services has spilled over onto users.
+This may have made you nervous about depending on open-source projects.
+I wanted to take some time to explain why the WordPress situation should not happen here.
+
+# A project is its community
+
+We started the project that would become CHERIoT at Microsoft Research around five years ago (it didn't have a name then, and you can see this in some of the older tests that simply say CHERI MCU in the name).
+Even before it was open sourced, it was a collaborative effort with major contributions from several people on the team.
+When we published the MICRO '23 paper, we listed five authors without whom the project would definitely have failed.
+Today, there are even more people who can look at the system and see their fingerprints all over some of the key places in the design and implementation.
+
+We open sourced it in early 2023 to encourage broader collaboration.
+Microsoft had no interest in maintain a proprietary RISC-V extension and associated software stack but did see a benefit in a secure microcontroller ecosystem existing.
+This is one of the key economic benefits of open source: no single company (or person) needs to spend the money to build and maintain a complete system, everyone can benefit from the contributions of everyone else.
+
+We put it on GitHub, because that's the lowest-friction way for most people to communicate, but we've tried to avoid people needing to sign up to any proprietary service to collaborate with us.
+I realise that some people object to GitHub's conditions of service, but my experience with running a GNU project is that the alternatives to GitHub sadly exclude more people than GitHub.
+
+GitHub supports anonymous clones, so you don't need an account to access the code.
+The project's real-time chat is done via Signal, which has a very friendly [privacy policy](https://signal.org/legal/) that we hope no one would object to.
+The linked page provides this summary:
+
+> **Privacy of user data**. Signal does not sell, rent or monetize your personal data or content in any way – ever.
+
+If you're happy with that, you can come and ask us questions without needing a GitHub account.
+
+We've also worked hard to make it easy for people to try CHERIoT.
+If you can use Docker or Podman, you can run our dev container image on x86-64 or AArch64 platforms (you can probably build it on other architectures) and if you use VS Code or some other dev-container-aware editor then you can just open the repository and use the dev container automatically.
+If you can't use these tools, we've written up instructions for building all of the dependencies by hand.
+We have some people working on FreeBSD and some on PowerPC Linux, for example, so we're trying not to exclude people who don't use the big three platforms.
+
+Making the project easy to use and easy to get involved with is very important to me personally and it's had some amazing benefits.
+We've seen folks at Oxford and RPTU formally verify properties of the CHERIoT Ibex core.
+We've seen folks at a variety of companies and universities build exciting things on top of the platform.
+We've seen contributions across the hardware and software stack from many different people.
+We've seen lowRISC build an amazing [FPGA prototyping board tailored for CHERIoT](https://www.mouser.co.uk/new/newae-technology/newae-sonata-one-dev-board/).
+Yesterday, I was at the Digital Catapult CHERI Technology Access Programme Cohort 6 launch event, where participants can build on either CHERIoT or Arm's Morello and *all* of the participants in this cohort are using CHERIoT.
+
+Back in July, Microsoft [moved the core CHERIoT projects to the CHERIoT-Platform organisation on GitHub](rtos/sail/2024/07/31/moving-to-the-cheriot-org.html) to make it easier for the CHERIoT project to exist as an independent entity.
+
+An open-source project is driven by its contributors, but that doesn't just mean the people who write the code.
+It means the people who try it and give feedback on improvements to our ISA and APIs.
+It means the people who find bugs and send reduced test cases that let us fix issues.
+It means the people who point at confusing bits of documentation that let us make life easier for the next person who tries the platform.
+All of these people make the project better for everyone.
+
+I strongly believe that the people in a project are more important than any governance structure.
+
+# Who can press the emergency-stop button?
+
+All of that said, purely pragmatically, there have to be some people in control over a project's infrastructure.
+For us, that primarily means the GitHub project.
+The CHERIoT GitHub organisation has three people with the owner role:
+
+ - David Chisnall (me), SCI Semiconductor.
+ - Yucong Tao, Microsoft.
+ - Ben Laurie, Google.
+
+If I ever decide to do to CHERIoT what Matt Mullenweg did to WordPress, I strongly suspect that Google and Microsoft would object.
+
+That's not to say that I don't have a commercial interest in CHERIoT.
+SCI Semiconductor announced last week that we will be [shipping the first devices in our ICENI family of CHERIoT microcontrollers next year](https://www.scisemi.com/news-1/press-release-iceni-family/).
+I don't expect us to be the only people shipping CHERIoT devices and the ecosystem benefits from second sources.
+The microcontroller market is tens of billions of devices each year.
+I would love to see 100% of those become CHERIoT devices, but they won't all be SCI ICENI parts.
+
+Beyond the GitHub project, I am one of five admins in the Signal chat and am the owner of the cheriot.org domain.
+Given that cheriot.org already mostly contains my ramblings, I probably can't do much damage with that.
+Microsoft owns cheriot.com, which currently just redirects to cheriot.org, but could point somewhere else if I decide to do something bad with cheriot.org.
+
+# What about a CHERIoT Foundation?
+
+CHERIoT is still a very young open-source project (it hasn't even been open source for two complete years yet).
+As such, our need for bureaucracy is low.
+We are mostly able to exist with free hosting and CI, and contributors are either volunteers or paid by their employers to work on the project.
+We don't do anything yet that needs us to be able to take money to maintain the project.
+
+Having a foundation would not currently provide us with any tangible benefits and would incur a lot of overhead.
+I don't want to create the kind of pay-per-play structure that excludes individual contributors and demands money from commercial vendors.
+
+As the project grows, we may need a legal non-profit entity to be the legal home.
+The CHERIoT project is set up so that we can transfer control to a Foundation easily if this is required.
+We won't do that until it's necessary though, and won't adopt any governance structure without consensus from our community of amazing contributors.