“Sun Microsystems has released the designs of a complete
microprocessor for free today in an effort to make its chip designs
more popular.”
“The complete MicroSparc IIep design can be downloaded for free
under the terms of Sun’s Community Source License. Companies that
sell the chip must pay Sun royalties–3 percent of the average
selling price–but they save hundreds of thousands of dollars in
licensing fees that they could have paid to just get a glimpse of
the design, said Fady Azhari, a marketing manager at Sun…”
“Under the terms of the license, companies may add their own
designs to the chip as long as they publish interfaces to the new
features, Azhari said. Sun doesn’t get control over that new
intellectual property.“