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'Cultlike' Devotion: Apple Once Refused To Join Open Compute Project, So Their Entire Networking Team Quit (businessinsider.com)
mattydread23 writes: Great story about the Open Compute Project from Business Insider's Julie Bort here, including this fun tidbit: "'OCP has a cultlike following,' one person with knowledge of the situation told Business Insider. 'The whole industry, internet companies, vendors, and enterprises are monitoring OCP.' OCP aims to do for computer hardware what the Linux operating system did for software: make it 'open source' so anyone can take the designs for free and modify them, with contract manufacturers standing by to build them. In its six years, OCP has grown into a global entity, with board members from Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, and Microsoft. In fact, there's a well-known story among OCP insiders that demonstrates this cultlike phenom. It involves Apple's networking team. This team was responsible for building a network at Apple that was so reliable, it never goes down. Not rarely -- never. Building a 100% reliable network to meet Apple's exacting standards was no easy task. So, instead of going it alone under Apple's secrecy, the Apple networking team wanted to participate in the revolution, contributing and receiving help. But when the Apple team asked to join OCP, Apple said 'no.' 'The whole team quit the same week,' this person told us."
Here's a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Hardware_Reference_Platform
No, they are not "starving". They got out of the PC business when it became a low margin business, a good decision.
Apple isn't selling server hardware anymore (they already failed in that market once).
As for Apple's desktops, they should get out of that market entirely because they won't be able to make the margins they are accustomed to in the future.
In TFA it says they formed their own OCP inspired startup, SnapRoute.
http://opensource.apple.com
Also, the one of the best things to ever happen to Linux and the open source OSes was Apple taking ownership of CUPS and making it usable.
The BSD license explicitly allows ripping, it's the whole point of it. If you publish source using BSD or MIT or similar licenses you should expect and like to be ripped off. Let's say you're very altruistic or you have some plan for profiting by it. If you don't like that, go for GPL.
A true Carrington Event level disaster will fry most IC parts, and has a high chance of setting back the entire human civilization by a century or so
Not even close. Geomagnetic storms, including the original Carrignton event, involve very slow changing magnet fields (10s of minutes to hours) over very large areas. The source of any damage (on Earth at least) comes from induced voltages, which depends on the rate change of the magnetic field and the area of the circuit of interest. You can work out the numbers, and find that the effect it will have on something small like a cell phone would be less than walking past a fridge magnet. Even a house sized circuit would struggle to produce significant effects, as a change of a couple microtesla of field strength over 10 minutes (on the fast side) would only induce more than a microvolt of voltage if you had multiple loops of unpaired wire around your house. The area within any paired wire is much, much smaller.
The only place such events can cause issues, due to the very small the rate change of the magnetic field, is by having lots of area. This is where power systems and old fashion communication systems are involved, because they can involve networks over very larger areas and can involve return paths through ground which is susceptible to ground currents in large systems. Modern communication based on fiber or twisted pair conductors would see no direct effect, and issues would just come down to what the power systems do. Even with the power systems, it comes down to having DC breakers installed in the right place, something already demonstrated to protect equipment just fine in past storms (a bigger storm wouldn't change that).
So no, such an even has nothing to do with destroying ICs or sending human civilization into some pre-electronic age. The only long term concern is what would happen to large power systems where corners have been cut and a potential mess for satellites, which is certainly capable of causing massive economic damage without becoming a prepper fantasy. Otherwise, there would just be a short term power and satellite communication interruption.