By Craig Matsumoto,
The adoption of open-source principles at Sun Microsystems continues this week when the company puts a Sparc microprocessor under its Community Source License (CSL) for the first time, hoping to spread Sparc's use in system-on-a-chip designs.
Some in the open-source community have criticized the CSL for deviating from what they call true open-sourcelicensing, and fellow processor vendors are questioning whether Sun can make the CSL work. But Sun's efforts beg an even larger question: whether the open-source policy that helped spawn the GNU and Linux software communities can do the same for a piece of hardware.
"At the software level, if we look at Linux and other products, it's something that allowed a whole industry to get together and get de facto standards," said Derek Meyer, vice president of marketing at MIPS Technologies, in Mountain View, Calif. "At the silicon level, it's different."
Sun began its CSL movement last year with Java and Jini software and is gradually applying the license to other products. The idea is to create a community of designers that can share tweaks and upgrades to the circuitry via the Web, said Fadi Azhari, Sun's group marketing manager for Sparc.
In the case of hardware, that means Sun wants "to make Sparc the core for any system-on-a-chip (SoC) architectures," Azhari said.
Sun also said it wants to spread the architecture to smaller companies, as Microsparc is being aimed at SoC for small network-edge devices, such as set-top boxes. Azhari estimates such devices will sell for between $10 and $15.
RTL files for Microsparc IIep are due to be posted on Sun's website on Tuesday. PicoJava was the first core to be offered this way, in April, and an Ultrasparc core is promised by the end of the year. For Microsparc, the RTL code for the IIep core (complete with PCI
controller and memory interface) will be
available, along with a programmers' reference manual, application notes and a verification test suite.
Anyone can download and manipulate the RTL file without charge, but by doing so they agree to the CSL terms, which must be viewed before downloading. Specifically, changes and improvements to the processor must be offered back to the CSL community for free.
Royalty payments are made to Sun upon volume shipments of any product developed. In a change from previous CSL licenses, which left payments up to negotiation, the royalty for Microsparc is set at 3 percent of the average selling price.
On the support side, Sun's CSL Web pages will include links to third-party OS and tool providers who can offer items such as compilers and debuggers that will be required to work with the processors. Sun can't guarantee that the third-party partners will be willing to offer their own versions of the CSL, "although we encourage them to adopt a similar model," Azhari said.
The plan is to create a community around Microsparc, where smaller developers can mingle online with tool and software vendors to wrest possibilities from the architecture. Changes and new peripherals created under the CSL have to be offered back to the community.
Bug fixes, likewise, are reported to the community, and Sun ultimately decides which changes and fixes get incorporated into the next Microsparc version. "So we still maintain the stewardship," Azhari said.
It's similar to the spirit of open-source software. If no one owns a piece of code, and the code is free for anyone to use and modify, then new uses for the code are developed more rapidly simply because so many more people are working on the project. This is how the GNU operating environment and its critical Linux kernel both came to fruition, through the community-minded efforts of engineers worldwide, collaborating on the Net.
In the case of Microsparc, Sun said it is hoping Sparc can displace MIPS
-- and to a lesser extent, ARM -- as the core of choice in SoC designs. By offering RTL code for the part, Sun said it expects to create an alternative for smaller designers unable to afford MIPS' licensing fees.
But Azhari said the company will run the CSL community as just that -- a community, and not a branch of Sun. "It's more about expansion, not 'I want to control you,' " Azhari said.
"We believe there will be more companies joining in -- more innovative, smaller companies," he added. One of Azhari's hopes, he said, is the CSL could help Sparc find its way into more experimental systems that challenge the architecture.
The strategy might stand a chance, according to Stanley Shebs, senior staff engineer for Cygnus Solutions, in Sunnyvale, Calif., a software and services company that has long championed open-source business models. What happens over time, Shebs said, is open-source software has a "corrosive" effect on competition, because the open-source version continually improves and eventually becomes superior.
"It's not entirely irrational for Sun to think something similar might happen against MIPS," Shebs said. "That's an interesting question, though, would that actually happen in hardware?"
"Even if you get the intellectual property for free, how do you knit [IP blocks] together? No company can give intellectual property for free and support for free." -- Derek Meyer MIPS Technologies |
Some vendors don't think so, and MIPS is one of them. Company officials have considered open-source models for distributing its microprocessor core, but they feel the model just doesn't suit hardware well, Meyer said.
"We've certainly looked at this thoroughly," he said. "Our conclusion is that people who received intellectual property [IP], who get access to designs, do need support. They also need infrastructure." Meyer isn't convinced Sun's efforts will be enough to create that infrastructure.
"Even if you get the intellectual property for free, how do you knit [IP blocks] together? No company can give intellectual property for free and support for free," Meyer said.
That attitude "might be a mistake," Shebs said. "You don't support these guys. You tell them they're on their own," and let them go to the community for help, he said. In fact, that's the model Cygnus has used successfully. "We do answer all our paying customers. The non-paying customers get whatever leftover attention we have, and they understand that," he said.
No Easy Road
Even if support and software are available, Sun faces a host of other challenges in offering processors for free. For one, it still takes expertise to do anything useful with a processor core.
"The CPU core is only a small portion of the job. Once you have the Sparc, then what?" said Stanley Yang, president and CEO of Triscend, in Mountain View, Calif. "We have two years of development into the circuitry that goes around the 8051 core in [Triscend's processor] the E5. Even if you assume that you only need a bus and a few simple peripherals to go around the Sparc core, that can be several months of work with a consultant before you even have a design ready to test."
Manufacturing is a more basic obstacle, and the most obvious distinction between open-source hardware and software. "You would have to make a substantial investment, even if you had the chip front to back, to actually get something fabbed," Shebs said. In fact, the manufacturing question is MIPS' No. 1 reason for avoiding the open-source option, according to Meyer.
Hardware compatibility is also trickier than software compatibility, according to Meyer. Software code can simply be overwritten with patches, but hardware often can't be changed adequately. "Even if you take the RTL to a designer and put the source code back in, the physical implementation could do different things," causing trouble in areas such as its memory subsystems or I/Os, Meyer said.
Finally, some observers are afraid a company could wind up agreeing to the CSL unknowingly, through the actions of a single engineer.
"That engineer who clicks on that website is acknowledging on behalf of the company for which he or she works that he or she is taking receipt of something, which essentially contaminates that company," Meyer said.
That raises concerns for Jim Bell, general manager of embedded software at Hewlett-Packard. "We see that every relevant engineer in the company is warned," he said. "You may very well find yourself obligated to give Sun a free, perpetual license to whatever you've done."
Bell characterized Sun's CSL -- for both hardware and software products -- as "an obvious attempt to gain the advantages of open sourcing without the obligations."
Small Is Beautiful
Cygnus' Shebs said he believes Sun is on the right track in one area, offering only smaller, embedded cores under the CSL.
"What they're putting out is not the latest and greatest Sparc -- it's the old one that no one's using any more," he said. "It makes sense to do that as an open-source thing because you're not losing anything, and you are gaining the advantage of having more people work on it."
Offering an expensive, proprietary part through a kind of open-source licensing would be a nice gesture but would make no business sense, he said.
"If you have a chip design that's worth $1 billion, there's no incentive to put that on the Net," he said. "For $1 billion, you can hire 1,000 programmers, at least."
Sun still has its toe in the water with regard to offering processors online. Only three parts are in the works, and the company has yet to decide if the recently announced MAJC architecture will be included eventually. Still, Shebs said Sun might be on to something, if it uses open-source ideas to spur interest in older parts.
"It may take a while, too," Shebs said. "[Open-source is] both a powerful and a weak strategy. It's weak because it's slow. It's powerful because it's potentially inexorable."
Additional reporting by Ron Wilson.
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