It's definitely not a flash in the pan. It's already taking off. Many chip makers today are moving towards RV for their embedded controllers. Western Digital mo

It's definitely not a flash in the pan. It's already taking off. Many chip makers today are moving towards RV for their embedded controllers. Western Digital moved to RISC-V for their embedded controllers, Microchip has a SiFive CPU in their upcoming PolarFire FPGA, Nvidia moved to RV to replace their controllers, Chinese chip makers (e.g. Sipeed) are moving to RV instead of using ARM. Those are only the ones that we know about. Why would they not do it? There's really no good reason to choose a Cortex-M0 over some RV core as long as your customers (internal or external) are OK with it. Do it matter that it's open source? Maybe not in terms of the CPU RTL being open source: you still need to do a lot of verification if you take your job seriously. But the fact that the ISA was open source made a bunch of people interested enough to start tinkering with it and contributed to tools etc. I think the open source part was essential to get the RV thing moving.