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OpenSPARC and Power.org, Who has it Right?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fight-to-the-death dept.

Andy Updegrove writes "Last summer, IBM set up Power.org, to promote its PowerPC chip as what it called 'open hardware.' This year, Sun launched the OpenSPARC.net open source project around the source code for its Niagara microprocessor. But what does 'open' mean in the context of hardware? In the case of Power.org, Juan-Antonio Carballo said, 'It includes but is not limited to open source, where specifications or source code are freely available and can be modified by a community of users. It could also mean that the hardware details can be viewed, but not modified. And it does not necessarily mean that open hardware, or designs that contain it, are free of charge.' True to that statement, you have to pay to participate meaningfully in Power.org, as well as pay royalties to implement - it's built on a traditional RAND consortium model. To use the Sun code, though, its just download the code under an open source license, and you're good to go to use anything except the SPARC name. All of which leads to the questions: What does 'open' mean in hardware, and which approach will work?"

2 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Binary minds want to know. by Maset · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    What a fucking redundant post!

    Your rhetorical questions (which are then answered, you dolt!) are the worst kind of sophistry; you don't even attempt to anwer the question.

    Stop trying to be clever and you might just find yourself being so.

  2. "show me the code" by Yonder+Way · · Score: -1, Flamebait

    Sun has contributed very little to the free software community. The only distros that do support Sun can only do so very weakly, due to lack of any material contributions from Sun. No hardware, no documentation, nothing. Aurora, CentOS, Debian, and so on can only half-ass support SPARC at this time.

    IBM has a whole division just for working with the Linux community and making sure that Linux runs well on all of their hardware. Yes, including Power architecture.

    So all of you folks running RHEL or SLES (IBM's partners), check out your source RPM's and look at all of the contributions released under the Gnu GPL to make sure that Linux runs like a top on Power architecture.