Competition. Multiple vendors can compete with RISC-V while ARM can prevent all competition with licenses, if it really will happen is a different case, but I'm optimistic about the potential.

Possibly, but historically it high end semiconductors seem to turn into a winner takes all market more often than not. If that’s the case it’s probably preferable to have someone like ARM at the top than Intel or Nvidia.

nope, it is would be better if it was RISC-V.

Why (besides religious reasons)?

I don’t see how can high-end/competitive RISC-V cores could be fully open/free and without that how is it better than ARM.

There is nothing religious here.

arm and x86 are not royalty free ISAs, RISC-V is, then RISC-V is mechanically a better choice, until it does a good enough job.

>and without that how is it better than ARM.

Only ARM can license ARM cores to others.

Using RISC-V, any company who can design their own cores can also offer them for licensing.

There's already tens of companies offering hundreds of cores for licensing.

This is much better than ISA-enforced vendor lock-in, which is the situation with x86 and ARM.

It's winner take all in a competitive scenario, maybe. Winner is all is what RISC-V is trying to make happen.

Most people want to build things not cores, the cores aren't the core competency. So the hope is, release what cores you have & let others improve it for you. Western Digital's swer-v core is seemingly an example of this thinking.

Would you not expect companies which actually want to make to cores to have an advantage?

And the companies that don’t want to make it their core business but can afford enough resources (e.g. Google, Apple, Amazon) would just use them to leverage their core products.

I could only see this on the lower end where margins/required R&D investment are relatively low.

I expect going it alone will get totally owned by everyone else working together.