Which is why you don't start off by trying to challenge AMD and Intel on raw performance.
But more to the point, most of Linux isn't developed in basements either. Someone like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft decides it's worth their resources to make a more power efficient chip for their datacenters and more valuable to get further improvements from third parties than to try to sell it externally at commodity margins, or that "commoditize your complement" would be a good thing to do for cell phone chips, and now you've got a billion dollars in funding.
I believe there is a good economic model for open hardware design but it's not the software model. "commoditize your complement" means that only those whit physical hardware can make money.
IMHO Syndicate with clever licensing around RISC-V infrastructure would be the best idea.
The clever licensing part:
1) mandatory licensing: licensees must license to everyone with the same conditions. licensees can't refuse to license.
2) pricing model: licensees periodically announce valuations at which they commit to sell their IP, and must sell their intellectual property for that value to anyone who is willing to commit to smaller license fees. There can be a periodic auction each year.
> "commoditize your complement" means that only those whit physical hardware can make money.
Those companies are the ones with physical hardware.
But it's also not true that they'd be the only ones to make money. If you lower your supplier's margins on hardware and then pass half the savings on to your customers, you get both higher margins and higher volumes. But your customers still get lower prices, which means they make more money too, on top of the transactions that it made feasible that weren't previously.
But more to the point, most of Linux isn't developed in basements either. Someone like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft decides it's worth their resources to make a more power efficient chip for their datacenters and more valuable to get further improvements from third parties than to try to sell it externally at commodity margins, or that "commoditize your complement" would be a good thing to do for cell phone chips, and now you've got a billion dollars in funding.