Apple's "Perpetual, Royalty-Free License" and Other Arm Myths
Deconstructing three persistent Arm myths
As we’re in the middle of a mini ‘Arm Season’ with a series covering the history of the company, I’m going add a few bonus posts covering some interesting aspects of the company and its products. First off, a short post to dispel a few myths.
Was there ever a business that was subject to so many misunderstandings as Arm’s? Is it the intangible nature of its products that leads to confusion?
In this post I’m going to try to dispel three myths that seem to crop up a lot when Arm is discussed. As a bonus, we have a link to a great talk with by Arm’s chief architect on the history of the Arm architecture.
The three myths are “Apple Has a Perpetual Royalty-Free License to all of Arm’s Products”, “Arm is a legacy architecture” and “Arm isn’t really RISC”.
“Apple Has a Perpetual Royalty-Free License to all of Arm’s Products”
I have to preface this by saying that I haven’t seen the text of Apple’s Arm licenses, and if I had then I wouldn’t be taking about it! So what follows is reasoning based on what we know about the history of the two businesses and about how businesses operate in general.
The logic behind this claim seems to be something like ‘Apple was a founding shareholder so in return they must have insisted that Arm gives them licenses for free forever.’
Why do I think this is definitely wrong? There are two lines of argument.