In a press release, Wave Computing has announced that the MIPS ISA will be opening up and will be free of any licensing or royalty fees with full access to its patents. This announcement covers both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. MIPS is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) often used in embedded systems, but has been originally designed for general purpose computing. Since 2000, an estimated 8.5 billion CPUs with MIPS cores have been shipped, by a broad range of companies. The goal of this change is for participants using MIPS to promote the architectue through providing full access to the most recent versions of the 32-bit and 64-bit MIPS ISA free of charge. The program, called MIPS Open program, will be cover hundreds of MIPS' patents, with no licensing or royalty fees.
See also:
Liliputing : MIPS chip architecture is going open source
EE Times : MIPS Goes Open Source
Phoronix : MIPS Processor ISA To Be Open-Sourced In 2019
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday December 18 2018, @05:13PM
He said "most open", not "completely open". Obviously the PC's processor design was not open (nor was the standard OS delivered with it). Anyway, arguably the x86 design was more open in the sense that at least one other company had an official license to use the design for making processor clones (that was a condition IBM put on Intel in order to use the processors in the PC).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.