While I agree that there's a whiff of IBM trying to offload responsibility for older tech, I think some credit has to be given to projects which pre-dated the c

While I agree that there's a whiff of IBM trying to offload responsibility for older tech, I think some credit has to be given to projects which pre-dated the current industry attitudes towards open source. A lot of things had to happen (probably including people of a certain generation/era passing the torch) before companies felt comfortable with the idea that they could open source their tech, and still have a competitive advantage over anyone else who would use it. In the late 80s/early 90s when POWER appeared, and RISC fever was in full swing, if someone, as a VP or C-suite level decision maker at a mega-corp like IBM, declared "let's just release all the IP of our high performance processor design to anyone who wants it!", they would have their coworkers and superiors questioning their sanity, at very, very least.