The Blog Formerly Known As SunMink
All the posts that used to be at blogs.sun.com/webmink

The big news today is that we’ve entered the era of open source hardware. Sun’s OpenSPARC team made the source code to the UltraSPARC T1 chip available today, licensed under the GPL v2, and you can go right now and get it in all it’s 70Mb of glory. There is also everything you need to explore it – source browsing online, simulation tools and Solaris images.

Making the source code to a chip available like this has a different dynamic to making the source of a pure software product available. Having a single source-base doesn’t seem appropriate; the commons here is likely to be distributed. It’s largely untrodden ground so none of us knows quite what to expect, but we anticipate a “free market” of code, where many different interested parties each create a design of their own based on the OpenSPARC code and then make it available under the GPL. The result will be an expanding pool of experience and innovation that everyone can benefit from. I’m excited to be pushing back boundaries with OpenSPARC, anything could happen!