History tells us that open standards pretty much always beat out proprietary ones in the end.
You cannot buy the company backing RISC-V to take out the competition. And if a RISC-V company stumbles, the ecosystem carries on. But if even one RISC-V company is in the right place at the right time, RISC-V can surge ahead. It is hard to imagine it does not dominate eventually.
I don't agree with history telling us that at all. HDMI, MP3, MPEG, .docx, DirectX, CUDA, I'm sure there are more. History tells us that money wins.
But I also think this is an example of a slight disingenuity in RISC-V being referred to as open-source. It's borrowing the clout of open-source software projects where the end user has the freedom to compile them at home. I can't fabricate a CPU at home, I'm still beholden to whatever patents the manufacturer chooses to license. SiFive have a >billion dollar valuation, for a business based on selling licences.
Those standards are adopted because they work. And they work because someone poured in tons of RnD to make them work. And those people are incentivised to do the RnD because they get paid (patents).
Nowadays nobody will want to work on foundational open source work for free only to enrich everyone else that builds on top of it.
You cannot buy the company backing RISC-V to take out the competition. And if a RISC-V company stumbles, the ecosystem carries on. But if even one RISC-V company is in the right place at the right time, RISC-V can surge ahead. It is hard to imagine it does not dominate eventually.