The ISA may be open but I'm pretty sure the microarchitecture will be totally proprietary. Even with a kick ass microarchitecture they may still struggle if they can't use the latest process nodes to actually manufacture the chips.
Having said that I suspect the main challenge RISCV is going to face is the software ecosystem. That stuff can take a decade to build and requires a degrees of cooperation between all the companies building chips.
They're not. They're doing it because they fear being SOL if America/the West enforces more sanctions on things like ARM chips/designs or Intel, etc.
And yes, IIRC RISC-V is MIT licensed or something close. Basically companies can take it and implement whatever on top and not have to contribute back.
I can see where this came from. ARM and RISC-V are both reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architechtures but are not the same. Arm is a proprietary ISA originally from Acorn. Risc-v is a new ISA developed completely open-source
EDIT: also, not to be killjoy, but for clarity "research arm" means apendage or division and is completely unrelated
RiscV has been used for small specific tasks but running a whole OS on it still seems far fetched with so many libraries being unsupported. (yes it exists already but that is also very limited in functionality)