I agree that shutting down licensing would be bad. What I don't understand is why someone would pay billions for a company only to shut off its revenue stream. That's a pretty bizarre scenario.
I don't think it's unusual that companies are bought and shutdown to get rid of competition.
When Palm will be bought, i think the resulting company won't build smartphones anymore (the revenue stream) but will only be bought because of Palms patents.
I don't really think this will actually happen, but if Apple buys ARM, it would basically have power over the whole mobile phone market (plus settop boxes, receivers, TVs and almost every other embedded system). It would put the competition to a serious disadvantage for years (until competition is able to switch to a new platform).
Even just owning a core technology like ARM has, in the hands of one company, cannot be good for competition, the market and the customer in any way.
But as i said, i actually don't believe that Apple will buy ARM. That day, i will lose all the last hope i have in the regulation of the market.
Still sounds like crazy talk to me. I think it's much more likely that Apple would just want to make sure that the CPU roadmap was going in the direction of their designs.
They have a history of participation in the AIM alliance. The Altivec instruction set is practically their baby. The reason they had to switch to x86 is because neither supplier (Motorola nor IBM) was willing to target the performance-per-watt that Apple needed to execute their laptop designs. If there is any truth to this rumor, I would guess it has to do with securing the roadmap so they don't get blindsided by suppliers in the future. That makes much more sense to me than blowing 8 billion dollars to scuttle competitors.
