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If you want Power8 stuff to come down in price to something that is reasonably affordable (even only double the cost of a current generation core i7 and $190 motherboard), what's needed is for the top-ten Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers to make standard ATX format boards for it. Period. Tyan, ASUS, Supermicro, MSI, ECS, etc.

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Some of the Taiwanese manufacturers do make OpenPOWER machines. However, the pricing is in the same ballpark as Talos™ and you don't get anywhere near the complete owner control that Talos™ offers. Look into the closed-source BMC on those machines, and also the built-in peripherals that require third-party closed firmware and, in some cases, closed drivers to run.

They probably want to see interest before making a large investment in Power8.

Interestingly, some Asus and GIGABYTE motherboards for AMD and/or Intel processors support Libreboot:

https://libreboot.org/docs/hcl/

So in theory, if this campaign succeeds, it may catch their attention, and we may have more affordable options down the road.

They don't support Libreboot, but Libreboot supports them. They (Asus, Gigabyte etc.) give a damn about free/libre boot firmware, let alone Libreboot.

That's why we need companies like Raptor Engineering! Vote with your money...

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