I think there are a lot of reasons RISC-V matters beyond just being open source. Working with MIPS tool chains is positively ghoulish, but they fill a niche. I

I think there are a lot of reasons RISC-V matters beyond just being open source. Working with MIPS tool chains is positively ghoulish, but they fill a niche. If another architecture that is reasonably well designed, with reasonable core licensing fees, and had even decent tooling came out I think even that would have broken MIPS's back. RISC-V hits the mark on all of those by either being open source or by using existing open source tooling effectively. There will be a transition period slowly moving to new hardware and learning barriers (but IMHO they're pretty low), but yes I'd say these kind of details are going to start to matter to the industry.