"The SPARC architecture has a long history of being open. Sun's open-sourcing of a 64-bit SPARC processor implementation opens SPARC in a new and exciting way and paves the way for the next Internet build-out," said Karen Anaya, CEO, SPARC International. "SPARC International is delighted to see the devoted SPARC community expanding to encompass an even broader range of SPARC implementations."

"Sun's move to open up the design of the new UltraSPARC 64-bit chip is a new frontier for open source. We've long understood the benefits of openness and sharing for driving innovation and quality in software development, but it has yet to be tried for hardware design. While no one expects garage hackers doing their own chip fabs, there's no question that hardware designers can learn from each other's work as readily as software designers, and that design elements taken from one chip could more quickly advance the development of others. I'm hopeful that Sun's leadership in this area will encourage similar moves from other players," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO, O'Reilly Media.

"Sun's decision to release Verilog source code for the UltraSPARC hardware design under a free software license is a historic step," said Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center. "The future direction of hardware design will be charted through the same principles of deep collaboration and free exchange of ideas that were pioneered by the free software and open source communities. Sun is showing its profound understanding of the forces shaping our technological future in making this decision."

In conjunction with the OpenSolaris project, the OpenSPARC initiative heralds the dawn of a new era of 64-bit industry-standard computing where communities can leverage well-designed building blocks to innovate and add value both at the hardware and software levels. In addition, Sun is actively working with the open source community to bring Linux and FreeBSD to the UltraSPARC T1 platform.