One of the major costs in IP development is verification, when someone buys an ARM core they're not buying it purely because of the ecosystem or the performance

One of the major costs in IP development is verification, when someone buys an ARM core they're not buying it purely because of the ecosystem or the performance/power etc. It's also because they know the core is verified. They also know they can receive support when things go wrong. You may be able to get a RISC-V core for free, but will you get a fully verified RISC-V core including support for free? Should RISC-V become a success then I imagine you'll see ARM dropping prices and perhaps core licensing will be a major cost in producing an SoC (as I understand it it's rather cheap right now, relative to full development cost) however you're still going to see people buying cores off established IP companies to get that verification and support. Now linux gets plenty of free bug-hunting and fixing, most people in need of a linux kernel will be off to kernel.org rather than paying a company to supply a custom one. I'm not sure you'd see the same thing for a processor core. Verification requirements are a whole lot higher than they are for linux.