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> agilely developed chips

I feel there's a long way to go there. The economic structure of the industry is against agility because "deployment" remains stubbornly expensive, and the product culture is also much more conservative.

> manufacturing also gets open sourced.

It's one of the most capital-intensive industries in the world, so I don't quite see how this would work? Libresilicon are offering a 1000nm (not a typo) process.

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Yeah, it's like open sourcing code for 3D immersive visualisation of deep-water seismic survey data, along with the detailed blueprints for the ROV and survey equipment. Awesome enough, sure, but pretty much useless to me. I can build the software like a boss on my laptop, but since I don't have access to any seismic survey data, a CAVE room to view it in, an oceanographic survey vessel, ROV and associated equipment, etc. that's as good as it gets. And, if I had all that awesome oil industry exploration stuff, I'd probably also have a team of engineers building me software anyway, so I don't need it.

My point? Open sourcing stuff with ridiculously huge capital requirements is not that useful, I guess?

It's useful for verifying the process is what it claims to be, and for debugging problems as a user of the process.

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