The Next Generation Open Compute Hardware: Tried and Tested

Open source software has been the basis of most of the innovation in IT the past years: virtualization, the new mobile OS (Android and IOS), the lionshare of new apps, Big Data analytical software, new storage software, Internet of Things... have all been inspired or even build upon open source software. Could open hardware be a similar powerful source for a steady stream of improvements in hardware and datacenter design?