The article didn't mention that the development board costs 1000 USD and the expansion board costs another 2000 USD, and it's only a barebone system, a full system comparable to a high-performance PC would require another 500 USD. At this price level (~3000+USD), one can almost purchase an OpenPOWER-based workstation (as we already have seen, the crowdfund campaign for Talos Secure Workstation failed due to its price, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=talos-wo...). So no, I still don't think RISC-V is as usable as a PC for an average user at its current shape as a prototype for developers.
You can download a lot of the RISC-V's source to use in FPGA's or your own hardware. Nobody has given me a link to the same for POWER9. There's also a lower risk of getting patent sued for selling RISC-V versus IBM's I.P.. I'd say POWER9 is nowhere near as open as the RISC-V offering. It's "open" like OpenVMS: using the word to get dollars more than maximizing openness.
I meant open regarding the hardware, bootloader, etc., but it seems like sifive has released more code since I last looked and you can now bring up a board without any blobs.
And yeah, we won't be seeing openpower on FPGAs anytime soon.
