Why Open Source Hardware Is No Oxymoron

“It’s time to stop treating data center design like Fight Club,” said Jonathan Heiliger, “and demystify the way these things are built.” It was April 2011, and Heiliger — the man who oversaw all the hardware driving Facebook’s online empire — was announcing the creation of something Facebook called the Open Compute Project.

As Google, Amazon, and other online giants jealously guarded the technology inside their massive computing facilities — treating data center design as the most important of trade secrets — Heiliger and Facebook took the opposite tack, sharing their hardware designs with the rest of the world and encouraging others to do the same. The aim was to transform competition into collaboration, Heiliger said — to improve computer hardware using the same communal ethos that underpins the world of open source software...

Last week, at the Open Compute Project’s latest public get-together, Facebook donated a host of new hardware designs to the project, as it continues to overhaul the gear that typically drives a data center. But this is only half the story. Two hours later, Rackspace — the Texas outfit that’s second only to Amazon in the cloud computing game — revealed that it has followed in Facebook’s footsteps, designing its own data center servers, and yes, it will donate these designs to the world at large...