I don't disagree that it would be great & all. But there's things working against it, that software doesn't really have to deal with (or at least has solved) is

I don't disagree that it would be great & all. But there's things working against it, that software doesn't really have to deal with (or at least has solved) is my point. And let's be honest, a state of the art block ported to the latest process isn't going to be 40 man-hours to customize, you're probably looking at more like a couple man-years unless it's very well designed... Which is why reusable core shops are a viable business. And how vibrant of an open source community would you have, if it took a small team a year just to customize & implement the open source design to their application? You would have very few users. Now, you could argue that because a lot of the real work is in the customization that they could open source the core. But where does the customization end, and the core, the root functionality begin? I think a more realistic pitch would be an open source testbench or behavioral model that verifies your core is fully spec compliant.