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When can we expect to see the license terms? This claims that "The terms will specify a zero-royalty RAND license as well as verification suites licensees must run to use the RISC-V logo" but it appears that free (libre) implementations might not be permissible.



RISC-V is a standard. Anybody can implement a CPU with the standard and then do whatever they want with that CPU. There are plenty of open-sourced RISCV cores already. Copyleft vs copyright is only an issue regarding how much of the extra "libraries"/layouts/foundry tooling has to be made available too.

Of course, somebody is also FREE to implement something that's "totally not RISC-V", and call it whatever they want. They can change one tiny thing or even nothing.

The major win here is:

a) if somebody WANTS to call their thing "RISC-V compatible", it must implement the same core ISA instruction set as everybody else and

b) all of these companies are pooling their resources regarding lawsuits or patent fights against the core ISA.




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