[roninb]

Do you think a similar series of events are unlikely to play out when you look at the microprocessor field right now? I see similarities in that there essentially are no open source processor options (MIPS is the only one I can think of off the top of my head). Intel, AMD, IBM, TI, ARM, Qualcomm, Oracle, the lot of them are closed source and I would think the same benefits that came with an open source operating system would come with an open source processor architecture.

That said, I think the biggest difference is the parity between OSes in in the 70s vs ARM/Intel's current dominance. That's definitely going to make it more difficult to get people to adopt RISC-V. I'd imagine if there was any likelihood that IBM, RedHat, Google, or Intel could customize a RISC-V chipset to outperform (whether it's TWP, flops/sec, whathaveyou) any current offerings they'd pour dumptrucks of money into it just the same.

[throwawayish]

> the lot of them are closed source

That's wrong. See OpenSPARC, where you can get the Verilog code for the T1 and T2 (Niagara-based) processors. (IIRC this was only one year after their commercial release).

SPARC in general is perhaps not a bad example, since the ISA is open and royalty-free and there are actually independent implementations (well, today only Fujitsu and ofc. Oracle).

It's quite interesting to see RISC raising again after it died rather harshly in the late 90s -- were literally every year a major manufacturer announced the end of an architecture -- and early 2000s (and remained dead rather firmly throughout the 2000s).