I agree with the closing statements that facebook is making a point here, it strongly says "we are here for the long haul". I think openness like this also advances datacenter technology and efficiency as a whole, its one aspect that's overlooked by most of us but plays a crucial role in scaling. If you can reduce power consumption, improve cooling and squeeze more servers in racks then we are looking at a lot more hardware to play with. I cant see small startups benefiting from this but large scale companies definitely, twitter comes to mind. Their communication platform will only continue to require more processing power and capitalizing on open compute would be a key growth advantage for them.
When I read about the OCP the conclusion I drew was that facebook liked their designs but felt they were paying too much of a premium over true commodity components. If you release the designs and get people interested it would seem to lead to greater demand from data center customers and greater supply from OEM's that would move to fill the demand. The resulting marketplace would be substantially higher volume and served by multiple competing manufacturers. That should drive facebook's own acquisition costs down, increase the volume they can order in a short time without paying expensive tooling fees, and allow them to play one vendor off another to obtain better terms.
I didn't really pay attention to the previous discussion, so I don't know if for some reason that theory's been debunked. It sounds a lot more plausible to me than it being a ploy to recruit software engineers, though.
While we're guessing why fb did this, it certainly looks like something that govt bodies which might need to run such infrastructure can borrow. If fb is, for example, shooting for the "national id" programme as I read somewhere, who'd you expect a govt to pick? - a company whose infrastructure cannot be touched or certified for suitability and security or one whose arch is laid bare like so? Of course, the software is part of the architecture, but would the "open graph" suffice?
Getting coreboot running on the Facebook motherboards would be a nice next step. It's probably not feasible for the Intel boards due to NDAs, but AMD is probably game.
