Comments on: Sun to release open-source Sparc designs

Move comes as part of Sun's commitment to support the General Public License.

[Blito]

Really good

It's great to see a non-DRM direction for chipmaking beginning to take hold. Custom designed cheaper chips should be near plus the ability for open source software to work well with the chip. Think about how much cheaper and better quality that $100 laptop could be.
With nano-chips this should add extra security that people have been wary of because people are more aware of what it is being made of especially at that size. Why trust only the manufacturer when they probably don't even know what they're making.

[FutureGuy]

Very cool..

..now we can get cheap made in China RISC chips. This might be the nail in Sun's coffin.

[zkysr]

Yeah right..

..just like the Compaq x86 clone was going to kill IBM. Last I looked x86 has the largest server chip share and IBM holds the server revenue crown.

[DavidHalko]

SUN continuing to lead the Open industry

Once again, SUN is the company who continues to lead the Open industry. Any vendor could build SPARC chips in the past or direct the architecture of SPARC through the open organization... and many vendors did.

It is healthy for the industry to see vendors collaborating without fear of retribution from legal departments. This is what Open is all about and SUN has always done Open well - giving its technology away to other vendors to use in other open or commercial products (firmware, os components, nfs, booting protocols, etc.)