This is the cultural difference between ARM and Nvidia.
ARM does care enough about their IP that you'll need to pay them for ARM's effort to develop their IP, but beyond that they will not restrict you unless it'll put ARM into legal trouble (basically export restrictions). Hey, you could get everything now with a one-time license payment if you are willing to do that. It's not FSF open, but it's certainly better than a lot of hardware companies.
Nvidia is trying to extract everything into each pipeline. You want to use their hardware? You have to agree to only use this to precise conditions that is purely for market segmentation, which conflicts with ARM's culture. Compounding this with the fact that almost all acquisitions done by Nvidia that was more open was closed down (try talking to Nvidia about Mellanox), if the ARM acquisition proceeded, it'll be a bad day for everyone else.
B: "it is a failure as a business. If you employed underhand tactics you could be even bigger!"
This is the phylosophy that gives us DRM on cars, 100 page lisence agreement with TVs, and fraud on wallstreet.
Obviously not true, but I can see how some might think this if their main comparators are companies that get to $1trn valuations in 30 years. Not every company can or should be a FAANG.
ARM makes prototype designs that you can extend, M1 is an absolute success of that model.
Regardless: you say they've failed as a business, your metric is how much they earn from being nearly everywhere.
I would pointedly disagree: they're everywhere, that's success, they're everywhere and profitable. There's absolutely no need to rent seek... this is unsustainable capitalist thinking.
They're able to innovate and turn a profit with their "modest" income, why do you need them to do more than that? How do you know they would do better with more money?
Intel (yes, apple to oranges) has many orders of magnitude more money, but most of it goes into bureaucracies.
See also: Microsoft, Oracle
Do you think that once they IPO pressure from their stockholders will cause rent seeking behavior? Even if they sold to nvidia frankly.
F*** Oracle definitely, they can't even bother to have a proper SystemD service on systems which uses SystemD, relying on scripts that are definitely not redeeming them.
To be fair, AMD does super annoying lock in/binning things too, though not with software locking.
For example, there was a Radeon that would have been a crazy awesome server rack mounted GPU for Deep learning 4U blades. You couldn't put it in a server because it was mounted on a chassis that was 4mm too large for PCI spec.
(Btw I hate hate hate Nvidia so this is not pointless whataboutism)
They also have moved to locking their CPUs to the motherboards, to restrict second-hand sales of surplus CPUs/etc. So far it's only locked to the brand, so you can put it in any Dell system but only a dell system, but it's still sufficient to cause a huge amount of headaches for the surplus sector. I was looking at some cheap Epyc 7402Ps on ebay until I saw... "locked to dell, only runs on Dell". Welp. And the other cheap listing, is that one locked too? Who knows, and that's the point AMD is going for, they just have to inject enough uncertainty to change consumer behavior. Most people aren't going to be willing to trace the provenance of a used CPU, they will just pay 20% more for a new one. A limited number will be sold as complete systems, but as the market shrinks and people stop considering secondhand purchases, eventually they will just be thrown in the trash. Mission accomplished.
And that's coming for consumer CPUs too. It's already here for AMD's "ryzen pro" desktop line, it won't be long until it hits walmart prebuilts too.
That's not "the point". The purpose of the feature is legitimate, but you're right that the consequences suck hard for the second hand market.
The thing you're talking about is a security feature where the CPU would be locked to only boot when the firmware is signed by a particular signing key. If you're a high-value target such as a cloud vendor or a government / military, attacks on the firmware are a legitimate threat, and this ensures that the firmware cannot be silently tampered with. This is a big deal to them and that's the reason why AMD implemented this.
But yes, most people don't need or want this. It's entirely optional, it's supposed to be something the customer configures, but Lenovo turned it on by default. Pressure needs to be put on Lenovo to stop doing so.