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May make some sense to discuss this in the context of servers, even if not previously discussed for other forms of free software- for example, if all your source is available, but it can only be run on multi-billion dollar server farms, is it actually meaningfully open? Does dealing with this angle require p2p solutions, or will single-point of failure solutions (with other safeguards) be sufficient?

options along the hardware access axis:

• requires unique or otherwise difficult-to-obtain hardware

• requires standard hardware in a centralized hosting setup (perhaps replaceable with sun's [network.com], Amazon's EC2/S3, or [http://www.joyent.com/accelerator/ Joyent's Accelerator.)

• uses p2p to avoid costs/reliability problems of standard hosting

May be that as HW gets more centralized/harder to replace, other requirements get more stringent to make up for the centralization.