I think the situation is far worse than ""just"" locked boot loader, the very idea that the most diffuse architecture in the desktop and server environments is closed and without any meaning competition is outrageous, _it seems_ intel is not even willing to sell even the rights to use it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver#History

I deep believe in the current IT revolution AI, self driving cars, virtual reality, current mobile platforms, medical innovation, etc, the idea that these fields do not have the all the tools we could provide because one company holds a (de facto) monopoly makes me furious.

What we are missing is innovation and collaboration in a broader sense than open source, as far as i know Intel cannot provide a customized cpu in dynamic and responsive way to help for example a research into artificial vision, with arm this is doable, granted you have enough funds, and i believe that arm business model, while being still closed, still encourage competition and allow any new company to join in the cpu race, to bring more innovation, even if is very far from being open source.

On a personal note I'm boycotting Intel (and x86) for 3 years, for their less than ethical behaviours and choking market strategies, see the antitrust ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_v._Intel ) in 2009 and the recent partnerships. I'm not saying Intel is breaking any law.

I've learned verilog and making a new ISA & cpu to get a better view of what it takes to make a cpu. ps: if you wanna laugh a bit, the day my altera FPGA was delivered was the same day intel announced altera acquisition.

I'm currently using a chromebook 14" powered by arm (A-15 based with 4gb of ram, FHD touch screen, 7h battery life, 0db) with gentoo and i'm able to develop without any restrictions, i'm not sacrificing anything, the cpu is able to fluidly decode a x265 FHD video using _software_ decoder with mpv. Latest arm cpu compete with lower end of intel with a much better PPW, MIPS are quickly catching up.

What can we do?

Even if every developer were to buy an x86 alternative desktop/laptop, it wouldn't make a dent in x86 market, in my humble opinion we should provide all the tools needed to actually use risc-v in production environments and promoting it for embedded use (arduino replacement, low end devices such as microwaves), and from there involving more companies to expand the cpu, for most companies cpu is just a component, the cheaper the better, some work with such high volumes that it could actually save a lot of money to use risc-v, even if they have to invest human resources to adapt it and expand it. I'm willing to spend several hours a week to help this cause.

I apologize for going a bit off topic.