For enterprises, it’s like SaaS vs lifetime license. ARM has restrictions on target market, volume, integration, etc. If you go the RISCV route, you pay once for the design but then the HW is yours to do as you please.

For academia RISCV allows open discussions all the way down for a complete system. Before RISCV can around a lot of academia was splintered around different old chips instead of cutting edge tech.

Current open source RISCV cores aren’t that far behind. They are roughly 2-3x slower for peak performance and maybe a little behind the Pareto frontier as compared to ARM/x86. Commercial cores are even closer within 20-50% depending on which benchmark you believe. A move from open source to commercial or vice versa is possible without impacting the rest of your stack. This is not what happens if you use ARM