[rescue] Opinions - what OS for Sun E3500?

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On 06/10/2012 11:17 AM, Mouse wrote:
>> AFAIK, Sparc is the most open CPU architecture there is.
> I thought ARM and MIPS were comparably open.  Am I confused?
>

MIPS seems to be open because of un-authorized clones.  Outside of 
China, I wonder how many MIPS chips are made that don't have a license 
from MIPS Technology Inc?  Also, has a MIPS licensee ever released HDL 
code for an official MIPS chip like Sun did?

In the case of ARM I wasn't aware of any un-official ARM cores, 
although  I googled it while writing this and did find one on 
OpenCores.  The notes say that it isn't fully functional, and it hasn't 
received updates since 2009 though.  Wikipedia points to another clone 
core that will boot linux.  It is only ARMv2 though.

Thus, I would say that between SPARC being an open standard that doesn't 
ask for a license to implement it, and there being two moderately well 
supported open source SPARC cores that it is fair to conclude that SPARC 
is indeed the most open CPU architecture.