Nothing is stopping it, just as nothing is stopping people from copying any open source software. My point is exactly, its not designed to 'stop it'. In fact, t

Nothing is stopping it, just as nothing is stopping people from copying any open source software. My point is exactly, its not designed to 'stop it'. In fact, the opposite. If somebody wants to replicate large parts of the open source ecosystem to support their extension then that's ok. The point is, that most of the time this simply doesn't happen and if it does, it doesn't actually hurt those that want to hold to the standard. In some segments of the market, doing such is perfectly fine and encouraged. In others its much more unlikely, difficult and expensive. RISC-V is designed to work from the smallest embedded chip to the largest server. Trying to create some sort of universality would never work, and trying to use legal means of preventing such is simply a bad idea and an anti-pattern. The ecosystem is designed so that all software is able to handle the different configuration and understand when a software is not supported and why. Its designed to have the base system be maximally portable and to cover most things in standard extensions so that new implementations can access a huge amount of tooling and software without issue.