[klelatti]

I’m not sure what else Arm is supposed to do if it believes that the really big customer has broken their contract with them?

I actually think this ought to be a positive for customers who are clearly abiding by the terms of their contracts.

[GoOnThenDoTell]

It doesn’t matter which party is correct, its now added risk that ARM could be the bad actor

[klelatti]

Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor?

Most firms will have legal departments can look at this case on its merits and decide whether or not Arm is acting in bad faith.

If I'm another Arm customer I definitely don't want a competitor playing fast and loose with its Arm contract.

[smoldesu]

> Why if Arm is correct does that add a risk that it's the bad actor?

Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to. If you could buy a RISC-V board with software support similar to a Raspberry Pi, ARM's goose would be cooked. Every enthusiast would ditch ARM in a heartbeat for a more open ISA, and ARM licensees would see it as an opportunity to finally wiggle free of ARM's insane license restrictions. All we need is the software support, which should be pretty forthcoming since most projects have already been optimized for RISC.

ARM could unseat x86 because both ISAs were encumbered with licenses at the time. Now, ARM is competing with much less restrictive architectures, and all it would take is a FOSS RISC instruction set to ruin their value prop.

[qwytw]

> of ARM's insane license restrictions

You're assuming high end RISC cores will be available for free and or under much more favorable licensing than ARM cores. Which seems unlikely, why would someone sell their cores to a competitor for less than a company whose only business is designing them?

[monocasa]

Same reason why people would contribute to an open source compiler and toolchain and distribute for less than the cost of the old school paid compiler vendors like Borland. These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply have strategic reasons to drop the floor of that market as much as possible. The same applies to RISC-V cores, with probably the most prominent example being Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores.

[qwytw]

Sound more like another "this is the year of Linux"..

Also hardware is pretty different than software. Hardware design (and obviously manufacturing) requires much more significant investment.

> These contributors aren't really in the business of selling compilers and simply

That's the thing. Apple was/is not in the business of selling compilers, nor are the people/companies who contributed to gcc and most other open-source projects. They have basically nothing to lose and a lot to gain from contributing to open-source software.

It's not obvious to me CPU design could work that way. For starters everyone who could develop advanced RISC-V cores is unlikely to give them anyway to their competitors since they would be in the business of selling CPUs. i.e. do you really think Qualcomm, Apple etc. would make their designs free? Why?

> Alibaba/T-Head and their open source cores

Because at this point they have more to gain than by keeping them proprietary. RISC-V is not yet overall competitive with ARM. So it's not like these RISC-V cores could be commercialized that successfully. Keeping them open probably makes further development faster.

[klelatti]

> Because nobody wants to fight over the licensing of a product they're shackled to.

So when a firm licenses a RISC-V core from SiFive they should be free do whatever they want with that core irrespective of the license terms?

[smoldesu]

No, but they have the freedom to design their own core if SiFive threatens them in the way ARM does.

[klelatti]

So you believe that firms should abide by contracts but that firms shouldn’t try to enforce the terms of those contracts.

I find it odd how Qualcomm is portrayed as though they were innocently minding their own business when they suddenly got sued. They bought Nuvia knowing what was in the two sets of contracts.

Also Qualcomm had and still has the ability to design their own Arm cores.

[ip26]

It’s not obvious who is in the right, and in my armchair opinion it looks like ARM has a slightly weaker argument. IANAL, but all of this makes ARM appear more litigious than egregiously wronged.