[jws]

They are specific about their open source intentions.

Open Source: The Parallella platform will be based on free open source development tools and libraries. All board design files will be provided as open source once the Parallella boards are released.

So we won't be able to fabricate our own derivative silicon. But we will have all open source drivers and tools. We won't have chips full of DSPs that we can't use, or GPUs that work a little bit through some driver that the silicon vendor had to get to MVP for a single version of Linux and can abandon in a year. Sounds good to me.