PowerPC is in the same situation, with 'OpenPOWER' (I think the Open must stand for "we're Open for business"?). Of course, open instruction sets like RISC-V h

PowerPC is in the same situation, with 'OpenPOWER' (I think the Open must stand for "we're Open for business"?). Of course, open instruction sets like RISC-V http://riscv.org/ http://riscv.org/ require no license fee. At lowRISC we're aiming to build a complete open source SoC using RISC-V http://www.lowrisc.org/ http://www.lowrisc.org/. I'll note that getting a license for an existing architecture and core implementation isn't as straight-forward as you say. You do need to negotiate and enter an agreement with ARM/MIPS/... (and ARM/Imagination/... need to decide it's worth their while going through that process).