While I agree that there's a whiff of IBM trying to offload responsibility for older tech, I think some credit has to be given to projects which pre-dated the current industry attitudes towards open source. A lot of things had to happen (probably including people of a certain generation/era passing the torch) before companies felt comfortable with the idea that they could open source their tech, and still have a competitive advantage over anyone else who would use it.

In the late 80s/early 90s when POWER appeared, and RISC fever was in full swing, if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least.

> if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least.

Well that was basically the PPC consortium. I'm not sure how much apple/motorola/etc paid to be part of it, but the idea was to build a common ISA from multiple vendors.

Hardware is different than software though: producing actual physical chips is extremely expensive.

POWER is hot, IBM is probably just confident that someone else producing competing compatible chips and taking all their customers is not a real threat / completely outweighed by the benefits of an open ecosystem (including more compatible but different segment (low-power) chips)

Producing actual software is very expensive. How expensive would Linux be if created by a group of paid developers? Postgres?

Don't downplay the work that goes into complex software.

Linux built up over time with zero upfront investment, starting with Torvalds in his bedroom. Silicon fabrication requires gigantic amounts of cash upfront.

I'm talking about the barrier to entry.

Time is a barrier to entry.

You don't think Torvalds could have gotten paid for programming in the time he spent writing Linux?

What is the sum of all the time invested into Linux * the average hourly rate?

That's not what "barrier to entry" means. Entry is not making 2019 Linux. Entry is making something.

I can write a tiny blog engine in a day on my existing computer. I can't walk into Global Foundries and ask them to make me a single wafer of my tiny microcontroller on their 14nm process.

Hobby software is on the same playing field as pro software, and can smoothly become pro software like Linux did. Hobby silicon is on the 1970s playing field - Jeri Ellsworth and Sam Zeloof making a few transistors with size measured in micrometers. There is literally no way to make your own "hello world" in modern performance silicon.

Are you trying to start an argument? Comes across that way if not.