Open Source Blog

· Sun has created an independent OpenSparc advisory board, which includes two representatives from Sun as well as three other industry luminaries. "Just like any well-behaved open source project, we want to establish an independent advisory board," explains Fadi Azhari, director of marketing and business development for OpenSPARC.

· The board will steer the OpenSparc project and after a 12-month period, it will create a permanent governance board for the project.

· The initial board members include Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun, and David Weaver, a senior systems engineer on the Sparc T1 development efforts inside Sun.

· The company has also tapped semiconductor analyst Nathan Brookwood, founder of Insight64, Jose Renau, a professor at the Univeristy of California at Santa Cruz and Robert Ober, one of five research fellows at chip maker and storage juggernaut LSI Logic, to sit on the advisory board.

· To help spur the OpenSparc project a little further, Sun is making available a set of software precompiled and tuned for the Sparc T1 chip. This SAMP stack, which is also being called the CoolStack by Sun, includes the Solaris 10 Unix variant, the Apache Web server, the MySQL database, and the PHP scripting language and runtime, all compiled using Sun Studio 11 for the Sparc T1 architecture.

· OpenSparc will also announce that Gentoo Linux is now ported to the Sparc T1 chip, and that Ubuntu Linux is seeing some significant uptake on the Sparc T1 processors.

· Finally, the OpenSparc project will announce that the first spin-off of the T1 design, the "Sirocco" S1 chip from Anglo-Italian chip maker Simply RISC, is shipping.

For more on OpenSparc, see here.

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