Stupid?! The type of reader paying $500/year for the Microprocessor Report (where this response article appeared) already knew. (Similarly if they were motivated to get it free or took time to read it through their university, company, pirate it, etc.) And the ARM response you'll didn't mention RISC-V by name specifically.
The notion of an open source entity building an open or semi-open ecosystem cannibalizing even a low-end player was already happening in phone operating systems (Android/Linux vs Windows); a parallel dynamic wasn't lost on anyone looking at the hardware/ISA side, phone or non-phone.
I don't see this as any more foolish than Bill Gates making the case for software licensing vs free software at the dawn of the PC revolution. You may disagree with one party or the other, but each laying out their case is a marketing must. If you want to compete at the low end, you have to explain your value proposition vs "free".
And 40 years later, after FOSS folks thought to have won, everyone is going with open core, finally realising why businesses don't want anything to do with GPL like licensing.
So anyone that thinks RISC-V isn't going to trail a similar path, is fooling themselves.
I'm not even sure what side he thinks he is on. RISC-V isn't an open core, it's an open specification of the interface (only) between hardware and software. And it's not GPL, it's CC-BY-4.0 (BSD/MIT-like).
--4th Workshop on Computer Architecture Research Directions,
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7542457
Mark D. Hill; Dave Christie; David Patterson; Joshua J. Yi; Derek Chiou; Resit Sendag
And 2015 full video recording of the debate between Patterson and Christie: "CARD 2015 Mini-Panel #1: Open Source versus Proprietary ISAs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=novCbl4Wq3I
The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd
and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple,
and VLSI Technology.
The comment implies, though, that they get a special deal because they are a founder. Neither Wikipedia nor the linked articles say that.
There won't be a source because the details of the current commercial contract between Apple and Arm will be highly confidential.
In any event, it's vanishingly unlikely that Apple gets some special unique rights to IP created in the 2000s as a result of having a big shareholding in Arm in 1991 which they sold completely in the 1990s.
Yes, Apple probably gets a great deal but because they are a huge, enormously high-profile customer who has worked closely with Arm on the development of their latest IP.
> ... we have entered into a new long-term agreement with Apple that extends beyond 2040, continuing our longstanding relationship of collaboration with Apple and Apple’s access to the Arm architecture.
It's such an obvious hit piece by a competitor where many of the arguments boil down to essentially "they did it differently to us and hence they're wrong".
Back then, RISC-V was not anywhere as well-known as it is today.