"the first step towards open hardware isn't really building a RISC-V system, its building competitive NIC's, keyboards, USB controllers, etc, etc, etc with open

"the first step towards open hardware isn't really building a RISC-V system, its building competitive NIC's, keyboards, USB controllers, etc, etc, etc with open hardware designs" Actually it's building the software tools to emulate these, USB is a dense standard, you will have more luck emulating a working USB device first pass before building out the supporting infrastructure. Once you can emulate/design your open chip computer, then you can start doing test runs/production runs. The market for such a thing will be limited to engineers and tech enthusiasts, at least until some hardware tech startup starts outcompeting the other players on the market.