Via Business Insider, a primer on Facebook's Open Compute Project: "...anyone can look at, use, or modify the designs of the hugely expensive computers that big companies use to run their operations — all for free."
The claim is Facebook is doing to hardware what open source code did to software and led to the creation of Linux and Android. Apparently, Facebook decided hardware like computer servers, switches, and routers were not its competitive advantage and began sharing its designs and layout. This has spawned collaboration between professionals in different, sometimes competing, organizations.
What kinds of business models will emerge, and what kinds of skills will people need to make the most of what we used to pay for?
