The Bright SPARC
- Article 13 of 16
- LinuxUser & Developer, April 2006
While open source dominates the software industry, open source hardware is only just starting. Rob Buckley looks at Sun's attempts to start a new market
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Open source and the GPL have revolutionised the software industry. Code is less buggy, prices are lower and vendor lock-in is becoming a thing of the past. But so far, few hardware companies have tried to bring the philosophy of open source to their components. While many use open source software such as Linux to run their hardware, few use open source methods to create the hardware in the first place. Now that’s changing, thanks to Sun Microsystems.
Sun has been late in coming to the open source party. While its competitor, IBM, saw the future before many other big companies and jumped on the open source bandwagon, Sun tarried. It made excuses about where Linux and open source were appropriate, developed its own licences as alternatives to the GPL and refused to open source many important systems. After a slow adoption of Linux in its product line and seeing dwindling sales, Sun eventually bit the bullet and opened the source of its ‘crown jewels’, the operating system Solaris.
Just like IBM, Sun has always been both a hardware and a software company. But although IBM stole the lead in the software arena, this time, Sun has beaten IBM to the punch. In December, it leapt into the world of open source hardware before almost everyone else and promised to release the source code to its UltraSPARC T1, as well as an accompanying verification suite and simulation models. Sun has called the project OpenSPARC.
Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun, says the inspiration for the move comes from the cooperative advantages open source gives. “We’ve come into a connected age where we think trying to develop large systems in isolation is probably going to be much less successful than trying to create large systems in collaboration with everyone who wants to join in the activity.”
But how do you open source a piece of hardware? Modern microprocessor designs are now created using a language called Varilog. Each chip design consists of many lines of Varilog code, which means it’s possible to release the instructions for any new microprocessor under a software licence. If the licence is a free licence, anyone can inspect the code, suggest improvements and incorporate it into their own hardware – assuming they have the facilities.
Phipps expects, as with many open source projects, that the main OpenSPARC developers will be other semiconductor companies, but there may be others as well. “People who contribute to the SPARC design are going to be a different category of developer. But we expect a diverse array of communities around the world will pick the code up and contribute it back. I’m already getting emails from people at universities who are excited to see SPARC designs being made available like this. It’s becoming the subject of research and university courses. People outside of semi-conductor companies are using it.” Nevertheless, Phipps says 5-10% of the industry – a “reasonably large global population” – are already sniffing around it.
Unlike with many projects, however, he doesn’t expect there to be a central repository of OpenSPARC designs to which everyone will contribute. Instead, the company’s own designs will act as reference code. Each company that’s interested in using OpenSPARC code in their own designs will download the OpenSPARC instructions, work on them and incorporate their own technology into the instructions. When the chip is finally ready and in production, the company will then publish the source code under the terms of the GPL. Other companies will then be able to use that technology in their work and so on.
Phipps said the company thought “deeply” about what licence to use for the OpenSPARC project. “We’ve picked the best licence for the job. Of the options available, the GPL licence is the most likely to help people understand the true openness of what we are doing. The family of licences like BSD or Apache are very suitable for projects where people are willing to take responsibility for licensing and distribution. There’s a family of licences built around Mozilla for forming close-knit communities around a single codebase. The GPL is a licence that’s useful when you want to make code widely available, want to do something on a global scale and want to make it widely used.”
The hardware business is, of course, very different from the software business. Revenues and patents, while controversial in the software world, are almost universally accepted in the hardware business as a just reward for the millions spent on innovation in engineering. The GPL, however, is incompatible with patents, stipulating that it may not be used as a licence unless any patented technology is licensed to users for free.
However, Sun has gone to some lengths to square that particular circle. “If companies out there want to use OpenSPARC code and they have patents, they can’t use that code under GPL. But they can come to us and negotiate separate licences with us. The GPL will help us to get patent worries off the table. Obviously, we’re not going to allow a hostile patent behaviour to express itself in the community.”
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