Examine this analogy closely. Open-source hardware and open-source software involve different processes with different levels of user participation.

The analogy of the way Open Compute is analogous to Linux was made repeatedly on the Open Compute Summit V this week. The analogy is fair — open-source hardware shares many underlying values with open-source software — but i discovered myself curiously disagreeing with the statement every time I heard it.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) is a bold initiative to position hardware designs into the general public sphere and let many parties use them. Collaborative groups have formed to specify what they need in an OCP-certified server, storage device, or datacenter switch, giving hardware manufacturers the choice to select to provide it or not. The goal is to cut back vendor lock-in, put more power into the hands of end users, and standardize key pieces of hardware within the datacenter to create more interchangeable parts.

These are worthy goals, ones that potentially overturn some of the established ways of manufacturing data center hardware. So, why, after spending two days in San Jose at Open Compute Summit V, am I thinking “but… but…” as Facebook’s Frank Frankovsky and Nick Corddry assert that Open Compute is rather like Linux?

References to Linux arise naturally since it is definitely one of the most successful, sustained, and adopted open-source software projects. New releases of the Linux kernel now appear every 70 days. Each contains as much as 10,000 updates and patches, a rate of change that equals 7.14 an hour. Linux’s fame rests not at the indisputable fact that it’s frequently modified. Rather, it’s frequently modified and likewise respected as having an extended-term future within the enterprise datacenter. The manner things are shaping up, it also in all likelihood has an everlasting place in cloud architectures.

[ learn more about complex Linux kernel development? See Linux Kernel Development Gets An Early Bug Fix Stage.]

The most comparable effort could be the thousands of programmers that Microsoft has engaged on Windows Server, which also appears poised for a sustained run as a datacenter operating system. But even it can’t compare to Linux, which periodically integrates thousands of recent contributors and accepts code from hundreds of latest and casually appearing, then disappearing, contributors. From the beginning of 2012 until the tip of 2013, Linux incorporated changes from 1,100 contributors who worked at 225 different companies. And naturally the result of all this work is freely given away on faith that engaged on Linux can be reward enough for continuing legions of programmers. That’s never been true for Windows.

And in a sense, it is usually not true of the Open Compute Project.

The Open Compute designs are freely available, but someone still has to provide the hardware because of the design. There needs to be a cost tag attached to that hardware, even though it’s an OCP design. And once a design is ready, it will unwise for the top user to fiddle with it an excessive amount of. An end user who desired to substitute one component for an additional or even give an element another kind of connector must convince the manufacturer to alter a production line. The cost tag must be adjusted accordingly — and significantly.

This is otherwise of claiming hardware isn’t software. The free-wheeling nature of Linux in its early days attracted developers from around the globe. It usually looked as if it would me the Scandanavian countries had a share of contributors out of proportion to their population, although all their work on MySQL will even have also colored my view.

Also, a skilled highschool student can’t download the bits of Open Compute design and do anything with it. On the earth today, highschool students are routinely learning to program with the code they’ve downloaded from a favourite open-source site.

By its nature, Open Compute is a corporation of hardware interests and their auxiliary participants: datacenter builders, component suppliers, integrators, and custom builders. There have been users at Open Compute in addition, but they had to be large, well-heeled users with a capability to reserve thousands of copies of a design they’ve influenced. And that they were. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Fidelity Investments are giving Open Compute a breath of life that it needs and the user influence it must attempt to expand.

To compare this process to the frenetic, churning, but somehow managed strategy of building the Linux operating system continues to be a stretch. It’s unfair to check the only to any other, when Open Compute at three years old continues to be in its infancy. But hardware is hardware and software is different than hardware. Until we will see better how open-source hardware will work, best be wary of comparisons to Linux.

Find out how a central authority program is putting cloud computing at the fast track to raised security. Also within the Cloud Security issue of InformationWeek Government: Defense CIO Teri Takai on why FedRAMP helps everyone.

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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