No one has to license anything from SiFive if they don't want to. SiFive don't own any rights to the RISC-V instruction set, only to the cores they design thems

No one has to license anything from SiFive if they don't want to. SiFive don't own any rights to the RISC-V instruction set, only to the cores they design themselves. Anyone who wants to can design and sell their own RISC-V implementation (as Nuvia and Qualcomm paid ARM [1] to do with the ARM ISA) without asking anyone for permission, without telling anyone if they don't want to, and without paying anything to anyone. [1] just, apparently, not enough