What’s the opposite of an antiquated product in a useless form-factor being hoarded behind a paywall? Sun Microsystems has developed the world’s fastest microprocessor — and is making all of the design details available by Open Source:
To add fuel to the fire, the blueprints for our UltraSPARC T2 (I personally like the moniker, “Niagara 2” – named after Niagara Falls, btw, and the great volumes of water that pass over them), the core design files and test suites, will be available to the open source community, via its most popular license: the GPL. Making Niagara 2 the only commodity silicon whose core designs are available to the open source community – whose strength, and market power, only grows by the day.
The economics of walls and safes and locks and chains is based in fear, hostility, suspicion, anger and doubt. Resources are presumed to be scarce, so if I don’t hoard them with an ugly vigilance, I’ll starve.
The economics of abundance is built on the opposite premises: Openness, candor, an effortless joy that flowers into pure splendor: The only true economic resource is human intelligence, a resource infinite in potential. By sharing with you everything I know, I will enrich us both: You will have the wealth I have created so far, and I will have the wealth you will create from that starting point.
These startling innovations are as new as Socrates, at least, so people can be forgiven for not having learned them after twenty-five centuries’ time. But there are two unhappy consequences to the economics of hoarding. The first is the tax on human dignity that comes from wresting treasure away with a thief’s cunning, hiding it and cowering over it, like the baubles in a raven’s nest, with a stingy, guarded greed. But the second is the vast riches that are foregone by this idea of wealth as trinkets to be withheld, rather than as ideas to be shared and cultivated.
We come back to Cain and Abel. Abel’s wealth is the raven’s wealth, gems and metals, portable and enduring but finite in quantity. Cain’s wealth is the fruit of the land, fixed in space and demanding husbandry, but potentially infinite in quantity.
The Open Source movement is the next phase in the cultivation of the human mind first perfected by the Greeks. And, fittingly enough, the internet paywall is the plaintive cry of the last of the barbarians.
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Jim Cosgrove says:
My 14 year old son recently saved up his lawn mowing money and bought his own laptop. Needing software but out of funds he downloaded “Open Office” rather than try to save up $380 so he could purchase Microsoft’s version. I’ve now tired it myself and I think it is a SUPERIOR product. It loads a little slow but the spreadsheet program is easier to use than Excel. The word processing program can convert documents to any format.
He heard about this from his buddies. It seems that the younger generation is ahead of their parents on this.
August 8, 2007 — 1:03 pm
Robbie says:
Of course the reason why Sun is giving away the blueprints for their CPU is that Intel and AMD have cleaned Sun’s clock so badly that nobody would buy the chip otherwise.
Sun has more red ink than Redfin. Still, if it keeps Intel and AMD honest, then kudos to them…
August 10, 2007 — 6:16 pm