It’s a shame. Good news for Intel, Amazon and Apple I guess. I’m sure glad the monopolistic thread of the Nvidiarm juggernaut was beaten back /s
To give a bit more context, I think arm’s license model doesn’t seem to work in either the arm64 server or mobile industries. Weirdly I think there isn’t enough value add between ARMs designs and selling the chip for there to be a solid market there. So you have Qualcomm in mobile churning out uninspired products and noone really competes, and Ampere in server being the plucky underdog who has trouble getting actual customers. And all the other big players are vertically integrated - companies don’t invest because they want to sell chips, they invest because by investing in the chip they can gain a competetive advantage in selling something else. Google, Apple(*) and Amazon have all done this. And it’s bad for competition.
So I think putting the line at the “selling the chip” level instead of “selling the chip design” level would result in better chips being more widely available.
(I’m very willing to believe that as you move down to simpler ARM designs the opposite is true. I hear a lot about ARM being used in IoT and the “chip design seller” model working well for that industry).
(*: Apple’s designs aren’t really based on ARMs in any meaningful way as I understand it, they just share an instruction set.)