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So there zero incentive to invest into anything as long as it might take more than a couple of months for it to pay off? This might work on a small scale. But

by qwytw 4y ago

So there zero incentive to invest into anything as long as it might take more than a couple of months for it to pay off? This might work on a small scale. But if find it hard to imagine that anyone would be willing to spend billions (or any large mount which would only payoff in several years) to develop some new product if they knew that that all their competitors can just copy it without paying anything and ship a much cheaper but otherwise identical product in less than half a year.

andyferris 4y ago
I'm not a hardware guy... but... Take a piece of open-source software. An individual pull request takes no more than a couple months - usually much less. We still get a variety of hobbyists and businesses contributing, and over the years the OSS ecosystem gets better and better. Some software costs hundreds of millions of dollars to build but for these there is usually some open source alternative that's somewhere between "passable" and "much better". I'm imagining a world where you can take a RISC-V design (or equally, some software/firmware for a cheap piece of electronics) and a business can invest some days/weeks making a small improvement (for some benefit to their own cheap product) - or a hobbyist can choose to do it on the weekend. So long as that gets in the open somehow (open sourced or leaked) everyone can benefit. It's a whole different world than a once-every-year-to-18-months chip revision. A "pull request" might only optimize a tiny chunk of the die, but if the pace of contributions is large enough that can add up. Along the way there are still incentives for businesses to invest their time and money.