What’s the strategy in open sourcing this?
There, one of the things they mentioned was that they were hoping that RISC-V in general, and their cores in particular, becomes a platform for academic research. That way, cutting-edge things are shared in the open and the industry benefits globally.
The optimistic view of this is that it's hoping for a better future for all. The cynical view is that open source is much harder to sanction/export control. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
It's because you cannot make money with it anyway and the university often allows it, so then it's really good for your CV.
In Europe there is also a lot of stuff open source, and I can honestly say there is no plot by the government to destroy the United States. I don't think Linux is a plan by the Swedish government to destroy the USA.
Most Chinese people in my experience also don't really have any country outside of China on their radar, unless they are in some trading business. China is just so huge compared to for example the US, they really live in their own bubble. It's not something they think about on a monthly let alone daily basis is my personal experience.
This makes life easier for competitors, so it's definitely a tradeoff, but it's the right tradeoff in some circumstances.
I think this is greatly overstated. Generally it's just sheer volume of capital and dedication to building a business that dictates market advantage, not any given persons' knowledge or know-how (though that's obviously worth paying for if you have the capital). I'd argue the primary reason why proprietary ownership of software exists isn't to make life harder for competitors but rather to make it harder for folks to figure out what they're actually paying for and bypassing the fees to actually fix (let alone improve) the software.
Linus comes from a family of ethnic Swedes, but he was born and raised in Finland, the Swedish government had nothing to do with it.
You can see the same with Apple and all big tech funding OpenStreetMap for example vs Google Maps. Even decreasing income for the competitor is worth it strategically. Or Satya Nadella saying in an interview that if ChatGPT just makes Google's costs higher for search is a big win for Microsoft.