Because it's a disruption moment, and people will be designing new things around it, and some of those things conceivably might be people getting on some version of the open train, and doing the rest of the system open.
Maybe this could end up rising around some other ISA. The closest I can think of is Raptor's impressive work around IBM Power9, but even the entry-level Blackbird board they did a few years ago is pricey, and I haven't yet seen an explosion of open boards at other price points and configurations. https://www.raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html
> Because it's a disruption moment, and people will be designing new things around it,
But this is just wishful thinking. There is nothing in riscv that will automatically lead to open fw and open hw.
In fact, from what we have seen so far the big commercial vendors have added the usual secret sauce and we have ended up with development boards that are neither open or standard
Someone PLEASE explain this to me? How in gods name will an open ISA result in open firmware and standarized hardware??
And what is open ISA anyway? Is MIPS open? How about PowerPC? Or, I don't know.. microblaze??