I've seen religious zealots who are less adamant than some of the RISC-V fans. Do people really self-identify with an instruction set architecture so strongly?
But, irrational zealotry can be surprisingly powerful: Linux would not have happened without it.
So while it may seem ridiculous at times, sometimes great good (and great evil) comes from this disguised will to power, and it is part of human nature.
I think a lot of people are really fed up with the status quo.
Management engines, millions of lines of hdd controller code, bios/firmware blobs that are basically opaque, etc are annoying and prevent me from having control over something I own.
Rightly or wrongly a lot of hope is being put into RISC-V as a way of improving the situation. The open nature of it might make it easier to break monopolies, to get control back of the hardware they own.
It's not about instruction set - its about open source. No different than the people who didn't get that Linux was a big deal because they compared OS features as if that was the primary driver.
> Rightly or wrongly a lot of hope is being put into RISC-V as a way of improving the situation.
Those hopes are obviously misplaced. The ISA isn't why your hard drive's firmware is closed. Western Digital using RISC-V isn't going to make them more willing to open up about the non-CPU parts of their chips, where their competitive advantages reside. RISC-V isn't even going to make anyone change their decision about whether to design their own CPU core or license an off the shelf core. The only real impact RISC-V will have on the industry is to slightly improve the breadth and pricing of off the shelf CPU core IP available to ASIC designers—and that doesn't have any implications for the openness of products incorporating those CPU cores.
RISC-V cannot break a dam holding back companies from open-sourcing everything when that dam is entirely imaginary.
The fundamental problem here is the IP system; even open-source is just putting lipstick on a pig. The core problem is that if you pick any particular type of device, chances are that no company is building fully open-hardware devices; it's a systemic problem. What's worse is that this is a solved problem - patents originally solved this, except for some reason firmware have copyright protection despite being a functional design, and thus they are gifted the privilege of legal protection without the responsibility of publishing documentation.
What's more, firmware's copyright isn't tuned for the electronics industry - they get protection for 70+ years, when it's duration should be the minimum duration necessary to properly incentivize producing innovative firmware. That's a variable period so I don't expect it to be an easy problem, but frankly it's not even in the ballpark.
So hypothetically, we will be legally permitted to modify the firmware of today's routers in maybe 2090 - no source code though. In fact the source code might have been lost forever, because copyright was designed for books and hasn't been properly updated before being applied to software.
Patents tend to last 20 years, which IMO is a far more reasonable duration (if your 2004 router design still isn't profitable then sucks to be you, you had a very generous window) - IMO the firmware should require source code in escrow in order to gain copyright protection, and it's copyright duration shouldn't last longer than a patent would.
