The analogy of how Open Compute is similar to Linux was made repeatedly at the Open Compute Summit V this week. The analogy is fair — open-source hardware shares many underlying values with open-source software — but I found myself curiously disagreeing with the statement each time I heard it.
The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a bold initiative to put hardware designs into the public sphere and let many parties use them. Collaborative groups have formed to specify what they want in an OCP-certified server, storage device, or datacenter switch, giving hardware manufacturers the option to choose to produce it or not. The goal is to reduce vendor lock-in, put more power into the hands of end users, and standardize key pieces of hardware in the datacenter to create more interchangeable parts.
Read more at InformationWeek.
