This could be a major disruption to the open hardware movement in general. LLVM's hardware incubator, CIRCT [1], is hugely driven by SiFive people. Chris Lattner is their President of Platform Engineering.
CIRCT is the first interesting thing to happen in the EDA space in decades and I would hate to see it nipped in the bud because of this movement in its chief corporate steward.
Just to clarify, Chris hasn’t been working at SiFive for about two years now (he’s working on a new startup called Modular). CIRCT itself has a number of larger companies invested in it, but it’s true that FIRRTL (CIRCT’s replacement compiler back end for Chisel) is predominantly a SiFive joint. I’m cautiously optimistic that there will still be significant investment in this piece of technology.
CIRCT is the first interesting thing to happen in the EDA space in decades and I would hate to see it nipped in the bud because of this movement in its chief corporate steward.
[1]: https://circt.llvm.org/