[StephenFalken]

We desperately need open sourced chip cores. An open community would build them with open source EDA tools and the final tapeout would be physically produced by a foundry. I know open source EDA tools are still decades away from proprietary ones, but we won't go anywhere if we don't start somewhere.

[vidarh]

We do have open sourced chip cores: http://opencores.org/

It's still in its infancy, and faces a lot of challenges that open source software doesn't, but it's come a long way in a few years.