PDP era and a question

As was pointed out on the NetBSD list, Compaq has officially End-of-lifed (EOLd) the VAX architecture. This follows a trend of having EOLs the -8, -10, -11, and now VAX series. I suggested to some folks, off list, that perhaps DEC should make the PDP-11 architecture "open source" in the sense of allowing anyone to produce PDP-11 capable processors but was told that Mentec has purchased the rights to the PDP-11 architecture from DEC. What's up with that? True? False? Kind-a true? (I know Mentec sells PDP-11 compatible computers) Given the complexity of the 11/70 CPU it should be possible to put the entire thing inside a relatively inexpensive FPGA these days. Given something like NetBSD that is already multi-architecture aware, that would make it possible to have an open source OS running on it. We could potentially get to a system that was completely "open hardware." (ie anyone could build one with no royalty requirements, and hackers could build them for fun.) --Chuck