FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE
trajectory akin to network protocol TCP/ IP or Linux.42 Linux, an open-source operating system, was created in 1991 by then 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Torvalds. It started out as a playground for hobbyists and idealists, but eventually became mainstream as thousands of developers’ free contributions made it competitive with Microsoft Windows. IBM’s announcement in 2000 that it would be investing $1 billion into Linux helped legitimize it in the corporate world, helping to put it on a trajectory where today it remains a major alternative to Microsoft Windows. In servers, it holds a respectable 14% market share.43
GROWTH CHALLENGES RISC-V still has a long way to go to be considered a real competitor to ARM or x86. Open-source hardware faces a far more challenging path to developing its ecosystem than software. First, the technical bar to contribute to an opensource hardware project is much higher and more specialized than most software projects. There are far more people who have picked up a software programming language like C than know enough electrical engineering to make sense of an ISA. Although RISC-V is more straightforward than x86, it still must
reconcile the technical input of hundreds if not thousands of contributors, though the centralized RISC-V Technical Steering Committee could accelerate the process more than the decentralized way Linux dealt with problems. Most importantly, an open-source ISA will struggle to progress without having the actual hardware on hand and creating
42 Krste Asanovic and David A. Patterson, “Instruction Sets Should Be Free: The Case For RISC-V,” Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences University of California at Berkeley, August 6, 2014, https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~krste/papers/EECS-2014-146.pdf. The RISC-V Foundation’s stated goal is “world domination.” “John Hennessy and David Patterson Deliver Turing Lecture at ISCA 2018,” Association for Computing Machinery, 2017, https://www.acm.org/hennessy-patterson-turing-lecture.
43 Glyn Moody, “Free software survives downturn,” The Guardian, January 9, 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2002/ jan/10/internet.onlinesupplement; and Paul Venezia, “Linux at 25: How Linux changed the world,” InfoWorld, August 24, 2016, https://www.infoworld.com/article/3109204/linux-at-25-how-linux-changed-the-world.html.
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