Also has the benefit of getting students used to open source software so they are most likely to continue using it in their careers and adulthood in general. The biggest reason people stay on proprietary software despite all the bullshit is because they’ve always used it and are most familiar with it, and think learning something new would be too difficult, especially if they use it for their jobs and would actually end up having trouble figuring it out at work for a while if they switched. Which would be mostly solved if kids grew up with Linux to begin with instead of Windows or Chrome OS; LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office, etc.

RISC-V has a similar hope for their project. Currently, proprietary microarchitectures can’t really be used to teach microprocessor design/engineering in school since they’re trade secrets, so students are pretty much stuck with imaginary teaching architectures and have to re-learn the real ones once they get hired at Intel or Arm or whatever. But since many real RISC-V processors are open source, they can cut the middleman and directly be the teaching architecture, and they hope that means tons of engineers graduate already with the knowledge to work with RISC-V in the field.