Simon Phipps, Sun's Chief Open Source Officer, imagines a "co-operating community" working like with Jini - not one of Sun's runaway success stories - each "doing their own thing with a common baseline and then contributing back innovations and fixes based on their experience."

Sun said it would publish Niagara specifications, including the source of the design expressed in Verilog, a verification suite and simulation models, instruction set architecture specification (UltraSparc Architecture 2005) and a Solaris port.

Sun said the source code would be released under an Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved open source license. Presumably it means its own Mozilla 1.1-based Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is not compatible with the GPL, but Sun says it doesn't know yet whether it'll use CDDL.

(This is an abridged version of a story that appeared originally at www.clientservernews.com)