I'm little confused about this talk and comments in here relating to open source in high performance applications (desktop, servers etc).
The RISC-V ISA is open source, I get that. There can also be open source Verilog/VHDL designs available. They are probably good for small low performance IoT applications and old processes.
But there is long way from ISA to silicon in high performance VLSI processor design for a new processes and foundries. Architecture, logic synthesis, timing analysis, floor planning, routing and placement, and ungodly amount of testing .. I don't see anyone spending hundreds of millions of chip design for RISC-V ISA and open sourcing it.
In other words, if you want competitive RISC-V chip, some company must spend hundreds of millions to develop their own RISK-V chip architecture and they will not open source it.
I wonder if a country like Russia, wanting something that they can deploy without worrying that the NSA & Intel are cooperating on state spying, will eventually try and take something like this and bootstrap a domestic semiconductor line of business.
Just adopting new Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is not going to help to magically boost semiconductor business.
The success in the IoT will depend not only in a cheaper price because of no royalties, but also in the "ecosystem": peripherals, buses, etc. Running Linux is a huge start, so I have no doubt it can be a success in this field.
Regarding the use in mobile and desktop, it will have to wait until SIMD extensions are introduced, and software being adapted (e.g. ffmpeg/libav including RISC-V assembly SIMD implementation for the codecs).
Anyway, realistically, for the RISC-V getting enough traction, some big player should bet on that, which is currently highly improbable, unless some Apple/Samsung/Huawei/Google gets crazy enough for doing it.