Sun is using the GPL license for the first time in its life to nudge along its OpenSparc gamble, its attempt to garner a third-party following for its novel eight-core UltraSparc T1 a ka Niagara chip.

It is also the first time too that the GPL has been used for hardware.

Sun said back in December that it would open source Niagara and admitted at the time that it didn't know whether open sourcing a processor would work.

It was also uncertain what open source license it would use. It has its own Mozilla 1.1-based open source license that's hostile to and incompatible with the GPL.

Anyway, as promised, Sun this week released the free hardware design point and Solaris 10 porting specifications for what it's dubbed the OpenSparc T1 hoping it seeds an ecosystem.

The documentation, which is not the sort of stuff Sun would hand to its traditional Sparc fabricator TI, is described by Sun as a pass to Niagara's unique multi-threading technology. It includes the source for T1's design expressed in Verilog, a verification suite and simulation models, the ISA specification and Solaris 10 simulation images.

Sun also recently moved to release Hypervisor API specifications so Linux and BSD can be ported to Niagara. It's supposed to give developers the information needed to create hardware, software, tools and other applications.

Sun has partnered with a bunch of prestige universities in a project called RAMP to build a 1,000-core scalable research system. The schools include MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin.

So far Sun has collected Synopsis, Aurora VLSI, Aldec, World 45 Ltd, SimplyRISC and Time-to-Market for the effort.

More information can be found at  www.opensparc.net and http://cooltools.sunsource.net/.

(This story appeared originally at www.clientservernews.com.)