Welcome to OpenPOWER, James Kulina!

I'm sad to see Hugh Blemings step down as executive director from the OpenPOWER Foundation (as a dual Aussie-USA citizen it was a distinct pleasure to meet him at SCaLE 17x, back before this whole coronavirus thing), but we're just as happy to welcome his successor, James Kulina. James also hails from the open source industry, and even worked for a little while for Red Hat when his prior company was acquired in 2014.

I particularly like the quote about his goal of making "OpenPOWER one of the easiest platforms to go from an idea to a silicon chip." With toolkits like Microwatt moving swiftly from proof of concept to actually useful, I fully agree I'd like to see OpenPOWER chips in all kinds of settings: definitely more workstation-level options, please (if for no other reason than to keep the Amiga crowd from making more bad choices in CPUs), but also there's no reason that small OpenPOWER designs can't have just as much fun in the embedded space. IBM and the usual corporate suspects can easily take care of the server world themselves; I'm not worried about Power ISA in those environments. Where I want to see it expand and thrive is back into all the market territory Power Architecture lost within the last decade, and a royalty-free ISA with chips, designs and full systems that already exist and are already performance-competitive is a great foundation to build upon. I look forward to hearing what the OpenPOWER Foundation under his leadership has in mind for making that happen.

Godspeed, Hugh, in your next project and do drop by and say hi! And James, if you're reading, drop me a line so we can feature your OpenPOWER setup for #ShowUsYourTalos. I've got one in the pipeline but we'd love to see your particular bona fides too. Welcome to the show!