See: "Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years"[1] (and then the 9th District let em them away with it, the dogs!).
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-sho... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31557324 (251 points, 3 days ago, 125 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20055517 (528points, 3 years ago, 300 comments).
And isn't greed what drives most non-technical upper-management folks, because "greed" is what they are hired for?
You can be an innovator running a license business, with a "friendly" stance towards licensees as you work to grow a massive market. ARM's mostly played this game.
Or, you can be a rent-seeking, litigation-happy shop that seeks to acquire many types of IP to force all market participants to license from you; unilaterally determine payments based on ability to pay; and threaten to tie up indefinitely in litigation anyone who doesn't pay the extortion. This has been Qualcomm's bread and butter.
Or, anywhere inbetween.
I agree that not all of these companies are equal, but ARM right now reminds me of Intel in 2016. You can only rest on your laurels for so long, sufficiently motivated competitors will be sure to remind you again and again.
I'm sick of this kind of comparison, like I detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31578523
Qualcomm systematically shook down everyone in entire industries with a web of technologies, threatening "well, even if you didn't use ____, you'll also violate ____ and ____. And, we'll cut off your access to important chips in ___, ___ ,and ___."
Between the two, ARM is an absolute pleasure to work with.
> If you want to make a usable ARM computer today, you need to have ISA extensions out-of-the-box and probably design your own cores
Samsung just moved from proprietary cores in flagships to Cortex-X + A710 + A510. Ditto for Snapdragon 8. Graviton is using ARM Neoverse-N1/N2. Actual cores from ARM proper are a bigger share of usage than almost anytime before, with Apple being the main remaining exception.
A. they are the larger company
and
B. they have much more of our personal data than Meta does
In this case, I think the comparison is apt because the only thing that matters is if the current IP owners are abusing their power. In this case, I think ARM and Qualcomm would wind up to be about equally as tyrannical. If you think ARM's slate is clean, you should read into the neverending drama that is ARM China. Nobody is necessarily good here.
I don't understand how having a regional subsidiary going off the rails on their own has anything to do with the typical experience of a licensee.
Not sure what else you expect Arm to be ‘peddling’ given this is and basically always has been their business.
Eh, if you have an existing big organizational apparatus built around IP extortion... you may be more of a danger than someone else who'd need to tool up.
At any rate a deeper conversation about this would go pretty far off topic, so I'm going to leave your strawmen and conflation of several different ideas and axes into one binary choice alone.
Greed may be what they are selected for, but I don't think it's necessarily obvious that's what drives them. It's also not necessarily obvious that this is the most robust mechanism to achieving sustained success.