I am sure the RISC-V core team has a much better answer. Their mission statement is a good start. https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-14

I am sure the RISC-V core team has a much better answer. Their mission statement is a good start. https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-146.pdf https://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2014/EECS-2014-1... The good news is that RISC has been around since the early 80's so any killer hardware patent will likely have expired by now. Note that the RISC-V ISA is separate from any hardware implementations. If you get fancy with your micro-architecture you can definitely trample on one of the 1000's of micro-architecture patents filed across the industry.