Some of you will ask! The answer is not that hard..

Sun is not only opening this microprocessor specs. Sun is adapting the concept of OpenSource Software to the microelectronics field! And IMHO why it will be a tremendous success? I’ll tell you why..

1. There’s no market competition – you’ll think that I’m nuts (I am!) but think of how many high-volume microprocessors you know that are available to other mainframe manufacturers than the producer of those same microprocessors? For instance, have you ever seen a SPARC-based microprocessor running on anything besides Sun’s machines? A Blue Gene running outside IBM’s? Guess not.. Well in this case you will most probably see Ultra-SPARC T2 bundled in other than Sun servers. And yes, that’s the main purpose of Sun, to feed a greater market than the existing (internal) one!
2. More eyes, less bugs – I guess that the OSS world has been showing us the truth in this sentence. I’m already thinking about Linux, BSD and OpenSolaris hackers looking at the specs and the test-suites and finding some strange things that Sun engineers did not..
3. Faster market adoption – The faster there are OSes and compilers supporting this architecture, the faster there will be a wide software repository available to it! And I’m still thinking on those hackers..
4. Boost other Sun products adoption – OpenSolaris, ringing any bell?
5. The “do-good-instead-of-evil” market effect – We’ve seen this on Google and we’re getting the same feeling about Sun (Java, OpenSolaris, Glassfish, Indiana Project..). Aren’t we people?

I must admit that Jonathan Schwartz has done it again! Gratz go to Sun.