Good news for RISC-V. As Arm tightens licensing conditions, the "permissionless" and cost-free model of RISC-V looks better and better.
Eh. The ISA of RISC-V is free and open. Actual implementations of RISC-V are not, in general. The point of RISC-V is that you may have the option to switch implementations if you become fed up with your current supplier, without having to switch ISA.
First of all: the licensing of RISC-V is much cheaper than ARM. I've seen Chinese RISC-V MCU's that only cost a dime or less. And these aren't itty-bitty 4-bit parts mind you, but comparable to ARM M0 or M4.
Secondly, there are numerous open-source RISC-V designs out there to give any company a head start and the freedom to modify it as they see fit.
Those OSS RISCV designs are academic largely. True performance RISCV designs are going to be people's money maker and never open sourced.
A head start is great but that still costs expensive skilled engineering time to actually make a worthwhile product. And due to licensing of OSS, it may be a bad thing for a company to build their multi-billion dollar business on something they need to open source for someone to immediately knock them off and kill their business.
In the hardware world, we live and die by our design secrets. If someone can simply copy you exactly, they can completely undercut you and basically put you out of business. A bit different than the software world.
That turns out not to be the case.
Alibaba's C910 core -- roughly comparable to the ARM A72 cores (at the same MHz) in the Pi 4 -- is open sourced. It is being used, at 2.5 GHz, in the upcoming "Roma" laptop. That is rather expensive (for now), but I suspect the same TH1520 SoC will quickly find its way onto cheaper SBCs.
There is a very wide OoO GPL'd RISC-V core that is under development. It is aiming for eventual Apple M1 level performance. The current iteration is falling short of that at the moment, but it's already comparable to the ARM A76 in the latest RK3588 SBCs: https://github.com/MoonbaseOtago/vroom