Those RISC-V supporters are so annoying. They never seem to understand the difference between an open-source instruction set, versus an open-source chip which anyone can synthesize, versus closed-source drivers for an open-source instruction set which contains closed-source additional instructions.

RISC-V literally has no "openness" advantage over ARM other than that there's no licensing fee. Apple could make a RISC-V chip and use it in their iPhones and it would be just as locked down as their ARM chips.

One is required for the other, though - you're not going to get any good open hardware for a closed ISA, and RISC-V and OpenPOWER seem to be the two shots we've got. We practically need an open ISA to succeed as a prerequisite for open hardware to do the same.

If by open hardware you mean open source chip then yes but I’m not sure that 1. that’s a big advantage for users or 2. going to happen at the leading edge of CPU design where most of us actually do our computing. It takes real money to design and test a high performance CPU and (even for RISC-V) an open source ISA does not mean an open source chip.

Yeah as a rust user and believer even I cringe at some rust crusaders, I've seen the same for RISC V as well :(