Facebook built its state-of-the-art data center in Prineville, Oregon, where it invented ways to use less electricity. So Facebook published the Prineville designs to contribute to the green data-center movement.
Then it occurred to Heiliger: Why not share all of Facebook's hardware designs?
“I wrote a short paper, circulated it to Zuck and the rest of team,” he remembers, referring to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Heiliger argued that the technology, particularly the hardware, “is not our competitive advantage." and that "open source should be a core tenet at Facebook.”
There are some huge advantages to making hardware open source.
Hardware engineers, no matter who they work for, could collaborate. Ideas could flow. New tech could be invented more quickly. Difficult tech problems could be fixed faster. And everyone would be able to share equally in the results.
It would be 180 degrees from the classic culture of patents and lawsuits and trade secrets that has ruled the tech industry for decades. But Facebook didn't make hardware, so there was no risk to its business.
Zuck was in. One argument was particularly persuasive: "A company in Mountain View thinks their tech was a differentiator. We didn’t believe that,” Heiliger says, referring to the fact that Google builds much of its own hardware and a lot of its own software and keeps most of that stuff a closely guarded secret.
That seems to answer that question... or am I misunderstanding?
In fact if you follow from the link you posted, down at the bottom under projects that fall under OSH, i.e.
https://en.wikipedia...ce_hardware_projects, OCP is listed there.
