[trotsky]

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.