Industry Expert Blogs

Most of us have heard the old saw “Good, fast, cheap, pick any two.” In the world of IP licensing both sides of the customer-vendor dialogue can have many more degrees of freedom, but the message can be the same. Just what are those degrees of freedom, and what do the parties involved talk about?

We’ll talk about this in the context of security/cryptography IP and “licensing” (not “buying”). Buying is more part of Design Services, and not IP licensing. The difference is you license rights to use IP, while Design Services is generally about building to order with all rights to the content being owned by the customer at the end of the transaction. Obviously these models can overlap, but here we are talking about licensing re-usable/re-targetable IP, not pure Design Services.

Back to those degrees of freedom. Good, fast, cheap is a start, and in a way cover everything; but maybe we can agree that there are broader dimensions to these, like: features, performance, size, quality, power, support, integration, and price. Each of these dimensions can be a blog topic on its own, but we will briefly cover some of them today.

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