@User: It's a longer and weirder tale than that. My awareness of it started back in March of last year at the FSiC 2019 conference in Paris; I believe the presentation videos from that are a matter of public record. The presentation by Ed Humenberger of Symbiotic EDA on the "ASICOne" project was sidetracked for a bit by a somewhat impromptu announcement by Jeff Carr of wit.com, that he was getting a foundry to open source its process and would be making shuttle runs available to the public. As I understand it, Jeff was the one who went around to a load of foundries and found that SkyWater was receptive to the message. After that, my understanding of the timeline gets a bit vague, but Efabless (mainly Mohamed Kassem) got involved in the negotiations, and so did Google (mostly Tim Ansell), and Google having the deeper pockets and larger legal staff eventually became the entity handling it all.