Johnathan Schwarz announced something yesterday that at first sounds quite dull until you read through his justification and where he’s heading with it.

Basically they take the UltraSPARC T2 blueprints, the core design files and test suites and then they release the whole lot under GPL online

It’s a gutsy move in that it completely breaks the model of what you’re meant to do with R&D expenditure in the computer industry. He already has experience of this with OpenSolaris of course, but to do this with hardware is unprecedented.

The impressive figures he quotes in his justification for opening up UltraSPARC also pricks my ears:

You’ll recall we followed this path with our software business - decoupling Solaris from its exclusive focus on Sun hardware. That experience validated the obvious: the market for Sun’s innovation is always larger outside of Sun, than inside. When we opened ourselves to the market, our business grew faster (Software grew 13%, year over year, faster than Sun overall). Now we’re following that path with our microelectronics business.

Let’s make this clear: he opened up Solaris open source, allowed it to run in more places, and the business grew 13% year on year.

It seems counter-intuitive: give something of value away, watch the value of your business grow. But that’s how software works as a commodity. License keys have no value, user base has value. Keeping a little team of ‘rockstar developers’ in-house to develop code has no value - having thousands of developers passing ideas through you does have value.

How you monetise that needs to change based on the area you’re sat within, but the argument that open source is not a valid business model increasingly seems to be looking to be a myth. Arguing the only way to make money is to charge for everything you do ignores the fact you can probably make a lot more by allowing other people to do it for you, on similar terms.