OpenSPARC : how giving away CMT chip hardware implementations creates value for Sun microsystems

Abstract

This thesis uses systems thinking and system dynamics modeling to explore how open source communities such as OpenSPARC can lead to enhancement of the performance of Sun's multithreaded systems and thereby increase its market share by increasing its share of the CMT ecosystem, and the share that CMT systems have within the overall computer server business ecosystem. This study explores Sun's motivation behind its investment in the OpenSPARC community, and explains how OpenSPARC creates value for Sun. The insight into Sun's value creation and capture strategy gained from this study can be generalized and applied to similar companies who are entering a new market where the ecosystem is not yet fully developed. The companies who benefit most from this study are ones which are strategically positioned to disclose relevant knowledge of a critical component within the ecosystem that enables its development without thereby compromising the full potential for value capture within the market. The key findings of this study include: a) Market adoption of multitcore and multithreaded servers is dependent on the rewriting of software applications with parallelization in order to boost the performance of multicore and multithreaded systems. b) The overhaul of these software applications will take the coordination and involvement of all the major players in the computer industry. c) The specific business structure of Sun allows for open sourcing the components of its systems while still gaining revenue on the sale of the system as a whole.

(cont.) d) Factors attracting open source developers to write software for a particular platform include a developer's belief that his program will be successful in the market. e) The information leakage to competitors from open sourcing Sun's multithreaded processor implementation does not diminish Sun's value capture of the market. f) The benefits that open source communities can have on market adoption of multicore and multithreaded servers, provided that the disclosure of the chip hardware implementation actually improves the technical performance and economics of the application software. This thesis will explore the reasons that Sun believes the open source community can be a catalyst for the wide-spread adoption of multithreaded processors and multithreaded software required simultaneously by all the major players in the computer industry.