Sun Microsystems continued its open source push today with the announcement of an independent governing board to set the direction for its OpenSPARC hardware initiative.

Sun officially made the design of its UltraSPARC T1 processor open source in March and said it’s attracted several thousand downloads.

The company said it hopes to gain new customers with its open source push.
Sun Microsystems OpenSPARC Project will Ignite New Open Source Community for Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Processor
Sun Open Sources Microprocessor Design, Lowering Barriers to Innovation and Application Development for First Purpose-Built Processor for the Next Internet Build-Out.

The OpenSPARC governance board is expected to solicit input from the OpenSPARC community for help in setting its agenda. The board’s five charter members are Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood, professor Jose Renau of University of California at Santa Cruz, Rober Ober, a fellow in the chief technology office at LSI Logic, and two Sun employees: David Weaver and chief open source officer Simon Phipps.

The announcement also included the release of a new GNU/Linux distribution, Gentoo Linux, which now supports UltraSPARC T1. Read more about this here

Popularity: 1%