It boils down to the ol' pragmatical versus ethical debate again.

a) Pragmatism dictates that in order to use the `new shiny' we use non-free firmware.

b) Ethical concerns dictate that no amount of `new shiny' is tempting enough to compromise our ideals.

I guess there are points in between and maybe these are poles in the debate with yer Stallman-types tending towards (b) and yer Torvalds-types tending towards (a).

I'd like a world without scary binary blobs and the Stallman in me chides me on my bad decision-making and lack of character. On the other hand, ooh look at the new shiny.

I think this is news because we had open hardware (or at least, we had fully-documented GPUs that did not require firmware blobs), and with Skylake we will not.

How do you know that the previous generations of GPUs did not have on board firmware ?

Almost surely it did, since software is eating the world.

However, the question I care about is "does the original manufacturer have more power over the physical device I paid for than I do". If my Ivy Bridge GPU has on-board firmware, that I can't change, well, Intel probably can't change it either. Or if they can, they haven't documented it and so the kernel driver doesn't provide the facility and so effectively they can't, short of NSA-type hackery, an answer I am happy enough to truncate to "no".

However, for Skylake the answer to "Does the original developer have more power over the device I paid for than I do" is "very obviously yes" and no amount of handwaving or approximation will suffice.

If they did, it wasn't the operating system's problem and was handled by and stored alongside the motherboard firmware.

This is not to mention that even if it were open source, it is not likely that the tool chain used to create it is even available, let alone open source. Firmware blobs are just a fact of life, for now at least.

Intel has licensed GPU designs from third-parties before, but typically only for their low-power (Atom) chips where they just didn't have the technology in-house.

Here, we're talking about a new micro-architecture for Intel's premium product line; I would be very surprised to hear Intel licensed anything in the design from third-parties. If Intel wanted their tool-chain to be available, they could make it so.

And i don't think it will become less common.

You can get a product out the door much faster if it use a off the shelf microcontroller and a EEPROM than a custom IC.

From somewhat old first hand knowledge. The GuC isn't that complicated of a toolchain, mostly linux based.

The GuC itself is basically a pentium processor running a very simple OS.