A replacement, yes. But is it open hardware? It doesn't seem to be the case.
This is unlike the recently released VIC-II Kawari[0]. That one is OSH proper.
The guy has worked on a complete chipset replacement for a very long time, I could understand if he would want to earn some money for his efforts before open sourcing it, he's under absolutely no moral obligation to opensource this, but I figure he might some time in the future, if people are nice to him. You know what's also not OSHW ? The FPGAs running it
Who cares if the FPGA is opensource? If the verilog, or vhdl, or whatever was used to program it was available someone could adapt it to other chips.