Yeah, I'm absolutely concerned about that too. Particularly considering that Apple apparently owns a bunch of the patents around AArch64 and cross-licenses them with ARM, so there's some ownership in there somewhere that lawyers have looked at and think are valid.
Oh, that would be great for Qualcomm. I imagine they wouldn't mind a future where, while anyone can implement the base RISC-V, only the big dogs like Qualcomm can implement the extensions everyone actually targets due to patent issues.
>Oh, that would be great for Qualcomm. I imagine they wouldn't mind a future where, while anyone can implement the base RISC-V, only the big dogs like Qualcomm can implement the extensions everyone actually targets due to patent issues.
Not an issue; Qualcomm is a member of RISC-V, thus it has signed the agreement. It has legalese designed to prevent this and further entire categories of legal issues.