"openpci" should have been open from the beginning. i fear now it may be too late to have any notable impact. aros has chosen against this standard, and gpl would probably be considered virulent, practically prohibiting commercial extensions and usage.
IMHO commercial extensions are not something we want.
You can still write OpenPCI drivers using the original SDK. That doesn't retroactively change licenses.
As long as we don't change the driver API, which is already very complete including DMA, etc. there is no problem there.
This does allow people to create new PCI hardware and all they have to do is make this OpenPCI.library compatible with their hardware.
If someone does add a new backplane to OpenPCI, then it will be well documented by the source code.
In ten years when they are tired of their project we can still use their hardware under future versions of OpenPCI, Aros, NetBSD, etc.