It’s an extremely shitty metaphor. But the ISA is the only open part. There already are and will be designs that will be licensed.

The beauty is, let them build highly performant risc-v cores to license. Everyone will win. As long as they don’t shove poison pill proprietary bits in it. If they do then no one should license or design around them. Because it will just create bugs and incompatibility. But if they want to be the go to designer based on the quality of their designs and not proprietary lock in. Let’s go.