When you buy an ARM from ST or Espressif, the license is already paid for. We have no shortage of ARM on the market or every other non-arm chips on the market.
Changing to RISC-V should theoretically lower the price to comparable ARM chips because there is no license to pay, but the buck stops there.
If a company develops a product with a RISC-V chip, they can still create a walled product. The underlying chip architecture does not prevent a company from being a dick.
The Atmel Atmega/AVR is just an old architecture from before ARM became widespread. And Arduino is a project that streamlined code loading onto a chip to make creative art more accessible to non-technical people and caught on. It could have been done on Microchip PIC or the Texas Instrument MSP, both widespread architecture at the time.
What I am trying to say is that we have plenty of hardware to do pretty much anything that we want and the issue of open hardware/firmware is on the companies that create the products and not the chips from the manufacturers.
When you buy an ARM from ST or
Espressif, the license is already paid for. We have no shortage of ARM on the market or every other non-arm chips on the market.Changing to RISC-V should theoretically lower the price to comparable ARM chips because there is no license to pay, but the buck stops there.
If a company develops a product with a RISC-V chip, they can still create a walled product. The underlying chip architecture does not prevent a company from being a dick.
The Atmel Atmega/AVR is just an old architecture from before ARM became widespread. And Arduino is a project that streamlined code loading onto a chip to make creative art more accessible to non-technical people and caught on. It could have been done on Microchip PIC or the Texas Instrument MSP, both widespread architecture at the time.
What I am trying to say is that we have plenty of hardware to do pretty much anything that we want and the issue of open hardware/firmware is on the companies that create the products and not the chips from the manufacturers.
Edit: Espressif is not ARM based.