at which point they proceeded to shit on those devs for being so awful at maintaining a critical project. It was nasty and unwarranted.
How about exploring the frontiers of open hardware (RISC-V)?
The back-of-the-envelope calculation from an LWN comment[+] (on the discussion "Is it time for open processors?") by Jon Masters, jcm, of Red Hat (but speaking for himself):
[quote] The problem with an "open" processor is the cost. It costs over $1.2 Billion to do a ground up 4 year OoO core of the kind of competitive performance that others have built. And even then, once silicon is deployed, security issues can still be found. In short, it will never happen. You'll get RISC-V cores like BOOM, you'll see some wonderful IoT designs, but you'll never see a high end Xeon-class core unless some billionaire funds it as a pet project, and keeps investing year after year for the greater good. And no, none of the major search/cloud vendors are going to go fund this - they want to make commercial vendors compete. [/quote]
I think it's a really "long shot", but we can dream. :-)
[1] https://www.coreinfrastructure.org/ [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/600571/