OpenSource boards have been a thing for far longer then open SoCs. So of course most of the board in the world will be proprietary and that fine. But open board

OpenSource boards have been a thing for far longer then open SoCs. So of course most of the board in the world will be proprietary and that fine. But open boards has been possible for a while, and the open source tools to do that are fairly good. RISC-V makes it possible to have Open CPU or even OpenSOC on an OpenBoard. That basically wasn't even possible before. We are even getting to a point where there are open PDKs. There are libraries of analog IPs that are open. Now that there are lots of options for OpenCpu people are going after the missing stuff. Open Ethernet PHI and so on. There is also now a big movement in regard to making the tooling open source to compete with commercial tooling. OpenROAD, OpenLane, Verilator and so on. The benefits of this are amazing. Project like Core-V, OpenTitan and so on simply wouldn't have happened. You have things like RISC-V International, the Chips Alliance, LowRisc, Google and many others working on all aspects to make a fully open ecosystem possible. But that doesn't change the fact that most SoC and most board in the world will be property, RISC-V or no RISC-V. > RISC V is not extension free Not sure what this means. Exertions are part of RISC-V. The waste majority of extensions used in the real world are all part of the same standard put forward by RISC-V International. Most of the non-standard extensions came about before there was a standard for them, and most are converging to the standard pretty fast.