About

• Version: 1.4

• Creation date: 2022-02-10

• Last modified date: 2021-05-06

• One line description: When and why you can or cannot discuss or reference encumbered information

• Author(s): Mark I Himelstein

Create a clear and definitive set of guidelines for how and when you can and cannot discuss or reference encumbered information.

Details

1. Encumbered information can have a wide set of definitions and instances. These guidelines may apply to situations where it appears that a good faith mistake may have been made around the sensitivity or licensing status of materials present in a RISC-V hosted location. If you have a question about whether something is encumbered,  please send an email to help@riscv.org to set up a meeting to discuss the specifics.  If you are unsure, consider the information encumbered until you know otherwise.

2. The word “venue” used below refers to RISC-V emails, meetings, RISC-V GitHub or shared drive files, http://riscv.org website or wiki pages, etc.that include RISC-V staff, meetings, files.

3. Never discuss or use encumbered information in any RISC-V venue unless it is clearly identifiable as greater than 20 years old (e.g. published paper with a date published). All later parts of this document refer to encumbered information as items being less than 20 years old.

4. Never derive or copy or refer to encumbered information. If someone adds something to a specification that you know is encumbered, please alert  the governing committee to determine if the specification refers to or copies encumbered information. If it does then have it removed from the specification. 

5. You may compare your results to results the originators or their partners or customers get from an encumbered implementation to a RISC-V implementation.

6. Please pay attention to the fact that even though an open source implementation may exist for an item, the documents or ideas may still be encumbered. Unless you can solely refer to the open source code, please treat it as encumbered information.

7. The Horizontal or ISA Committee should provide best-effort review of specifications for the use of or reference to encumbered information and remove it before Freeze and Vote-Ready milestones (see the RISC-V Development Process).

8. The RISC-V Technical Program Managers will provide final review for encumbered information as a sign-off step to the Freeze and Vote-Ready Milestones (requirement for public review).

9. If you want to discuss encumbered information, you should do this outside any RISC-V venue.

10. You must also abide by the RISC-V Regulations (found on the http://riscv.org website). If anything in this document is contradictory to that information, the RISC-V International Regulations override anything in this document.

11. If you have any questions please send a request for a meeting regarding this topic to help@riscv.org.

Exceptions

None allowed.

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