An InforWorld article, Sun Blazes Trails With Open Source Silicon, explains the background for Sun's open-sourcing the source code of the UltraSPARC T1 processor under the General Public License (GPL) as part of the OpenSPARC Project. To quote the article:

If a whole community of engineers could work together to tweak and adjust a processor design, a single chip might grow into a family of parts that serves the needs of a variety of unique niches.

The author was at first skeptical, he wrote, but then changed his mind and concluded that it looks like a sound move on Sun's part after all—one that's worth watching. Let's hope that the initiative will open up an amazing horizon in the hardware arena, in which all of us users will benefit.