Last summer, IBM set up Power,org, to promote its PowerPC chip as what it called "open hardware." This year, Sun launched the OpenSPARC.net open source project around the source code for its Niagera microprocessor. But what does "open" mean in the context of hardware? In the case of Power.org, Juan-Antonio Carballo said, "It includes but is not limited to open source, where specifications or source code are freely available and can be modified by a community of users. It could also mean that the hardware details can be viewed, but not modified. And it does not necessarily mean that open hardware, or designs that contain it, are free of charge."

True to that statement, you have to pay to participate meaningfully in Power.org, as well as pay royalties to implement - it's built on a traditional RAND consortium model. To use the Sun code, though, its just download the code under an open source license, and you're good to go to use anything except the SPARC name. All of which leads to the questions: "What does "open" mean in hardware, and which approach will work?"

In the last several days there have been several stories in the news that highlight the increasing tension between ownership of intellectual property rights (IPR) and the opportunities that become available when broader, free access to those rights is made available.  The three articles that struck me as best proving this point were the announcement by Sun Microsystems that it had released the design for its new UltraSPARC processor under the GNU GPL, a speech by Tim Berners-Lee to an Oxford University audience in which he challenged the British government to make Ordinance Survey mapping data available at no cost for Web use, and reports that a Dutch court had upheld the validity of the Creative Commons license.  Each of these stories demonstrates a breach in traditional thinking about the balance of value to an IPR owner between licensing those rights for profit, or making those same rights freely and publicly available.

In the case of the Sun announcement, that breach is expansion of the open source methodology form software to silicon - a genetic leap, if you will, from one species of technology to another.  Tim Berners-Lee's challenge, on the other hand, is an example of the increasingly popular concept that "data wants to be free," and that the greatest societal benefit may result from allowing it to be so.  And the Creative Commons victory demonstrates that traditional legal concepts can be adapted to successfully accommodate such new realities.

IBM and other companies have announced three new initiatives with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that are intended to stop bad patents from issuing, and rank those that do anyway.

When you're the 900 pound gorilla and realize you have to begin playing on the other guy’s battleground instead of your own, that’s when you know you’ve jumped the shark.

If you visit Groklaw, you know about The Daemon, the Gnu and the Penguin, a new book by Peter Salus being serialized there, with a new chapter appearing each Thursday. Of course, if you don't visit Groklaw, you probably wouldn't want to admit it, since Groklaw has long been one of the "be there or be square" hangouts on the Web for those of the open source persuasion and their fellow travelers.

Nothing lasts forever. Not you. Not me. And certainly not consortia.

What do 13 nations concerned with Open ICT Systems and 13 European companies wanting to roll the U.S. and Japan in middleware have in common? They both made major announcements this week.

What's important about a standards story? Well, that depends on your audience, doesn't it?

Announcing the answer before knowing and understanding the facts is an increasingly popular pastime. My, but it does get tedious living in a world filled with experts.

In 1991, it was the PowerOpen Consortium, and the goal was to create open standards on top of a proprietary architecture. Now, in 2005, its Power.org, and the processor is the same (the IBM PowerPC), but this time the name of the game is "Open Hardware." Will the model take off like open source?