Thinking About Azure Sphere and Licensing (Premium)

Contrary to various reports, Microsoft will indeed charge a licensing fee for Azure Sphere. Is this a problem?

Maybe.

One of the reasons that Windows phone failed is that Microsoft charged a licensing fee for the OS. This was a hotly-debated topic internally at the time, but the chief worry was that giving away the Windows Phone OS would undercut and then kill Microsoft's then-lucrative licensing program for "big" Windows. So Windows Phone OS was not given away for free, and it never became an effective alternative to Android.

(I know that Android isn't really free either, because any handset maker that wants the Google Play Store has to license that and various Google top-tier apps. But Android was always very inexpensive, and it was far more adaptable to different form factors and configurations than was the locked-down Windows phone platform.)

So I naturally wondered whether Microsoft had learned the lessons of the past. Or whether it would make the same mistake as it did with Windows phone.

But as was the case with the security issues I mentioned yesterday---where Microsoft supports my contention that it only picked Linux for its Azure Sphere OS because of its size and suitability in such resource-constrained environments---Microsoft has done a poor job of communicating how it intends to license Azure Sphere.

More specifically, Brad Smith indicated during the announcement that Microsoft would not charge partners for Azure Sphere.

"What we're doing to jump-start this new ecosystem that we so clearly need is to license this technology and intellectual property royalty-free to any silicon manufacturer," Smith said during the announcement.

That seems clear-cut. But in a related blog post, Microsoft somewhat clarified the situation, noting that the "royalty-free" aspects of Azure Sphere were related only to the security technologies.

"To ensure our ecosystem of partners expands rapidly, we’re licensing our silicon security technologies to them royalty-free," Microsoft explained. "This enables any silicon manufacturer to build Azure Sphere chips while keeping costs down and prices affordable to device manufacturers."

This doesn't seem to mean "free." Just "keeping costs down." (Also, "royalty-free" may be related to Microsoft's contention that Linux violates its IP.)

So I asked. Was Microsoft charging partners a licensing fee for Azure Sphere?

"Yes, we will collect a licensing fee for Azure Sphere," a Microsoft representative told me. "When a device manufacturer licenses the Azure Sphere solution, they’ll receive an Azure Sphere certified chip, device access to the Azure Sphere Security Service for the 10-year lifetime of the device, and IoT OS updates, delivered to devices through the Azure Sphere Security Service for the 10-year lifetime of the device."

It's not clear, of course, how (or, more aptly, how much) Microsoft will charge for this license. And my belief is that it will be low-cost, and n...

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