It's an open ISA for vendors to use. If they want to keep everything else restricted and closed source, they can do it. RISC-V only means the ISA is open source.
SiFive incorporates closed source hardware and firmware from various partners, and perhaps some of their own too.
Conversation
A lot of vendors are going to see it primarily as a way to save money by avoiding an ARM license. Many RISC-V products won't be any more open than the alternatives using an ARM SoC. Can make entirely closed source RISC-V hardware. Can make proprietary ISA extensions to it too.
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you're of course entirely correct, but SiFive also wants to capitalize on intangible "freedom" (even their SoC names have that!). they can talk the talk, but then they have to walk the walk, too
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that "freedom" includes the freedom for other vendors to make proprietary designs (and that's fine) as well as the freedom for developers to use RISC-V designs from the people who started it all. the latter does in fact include the freedom to share the SoC manual
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also, SiFive's behavior, which includes a thinly veiled legal threat, is more hostile than the behavior of many other vendors that make no claims about "freedom" but tacitly accept sharing of documents that is usual in the industry.
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or to put it differently: they may not have any formal obligation (I don't know whether CrowdSupply's policy is enforceable) but they sure do have a moral obligation based on the way they promote their work
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I agree that they're being quite scummy. I think a lot of people interpret RISC-V as implying open firmware and open hardware when in reality both can be entirely closed. It's not clear to me how much of this SoC is actually open and they make it hard to get information/sources.
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FU740 is not *especially* open but I preordered their board because it seemed like an incremental advance and would have probably been less obnoxious to work with than the usual Qualcomm/Mediatek/... stuff in a similar performance range
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I haven't verified this in detail, but for their earlier SoCs, the docs and the HDL were all public, whereas the bootrom, bizarrely, was not. I don't think they were ever offering the most "freedom" they could but it did seem like a reasonable choice better than many alternatives
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I heard from others that the CPU cores were open source but the rest of the SoC including the memory controller, etc. was largely closed source. My assumption from that was that the code for dealing with the memory controller and other miscellaneous stuff isn't theirs to release.
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Tried to look into it but I got the feeling that they were deliberately making it hard to get documentation and other information so I lost interest in trying to research it.
I'm very much not a fan of these products not being clear about what is or isn't actually open source.