I’ve developed a habit of listening to videos during my bike ride home after work. This week, I came across a video by XPIN about RISC-V. The video presents a viewpoint: RISC-V, as an instruction set architecture, suffers from severe fragmentation in its chip products, which poses significant challenges to the development of its application ecosystem. Therefore, it’s argued that fragmentation must be addressed through unified standards to achieve rapid development. This perspective reminded me of my years of experience using Linux, Android, and the R language, leading me to believe that the video’s argument might not be entirely accurate.
If fragmentation truly posed such a serious obstacle to technology adoption as suggested in the video, it would be difficult to explain why Linux has managed to capture a much larger market share than Windows in the server domain, why Android has secured its position in the global mobile device market, and why R language has developed so successfully in statistical computing that it even presents strong competition to commercial software like SAS.
Personally, I believe the term “fragmentation” is often used to emphasize the negative aspects of open-source technologies. Many discussions on this topic tend to magnify the negative impacts of “fragmentation” while selectively overlooking the core value of open-source technology—“freedom”, even if it’s the “limited freedom” for some time.
It is precisely this freedom that allows individuals without financial resources or existing networks to take part, thereby maximizing the collective wisdom of contributors and driving technological progress.
I firmly believe that RISC-V will develop at a pace exceeding expectations, just like other open-source technologies, especially in an era where commercial technologies might become unavailable at any moment…
