Back in May, Huawei was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce"s Entity list, effectively banning U.S. companies from doing business with the Chinese firm. This caused a number of problems for Huawei, such as having to launch its Mate 30 series of flagship handsets without any support for Google apps.
There"s some good news though, at least from the Microsoft side of things. According to Reuters, Microsoft now has a license to "export mass-market software to Huawei". Unfortunately, the report isn"t clear on what those mass-market products are.
It seems likely, however, that Microsoft can once again sell licenses for Windows 10 to the Shenzhen firm. Earlier this week, there were some leaks of new laptops from Huawei, so if Microsoft can indeed license Windows 10 to Huawei, things start to make more sense. Without this, the devices would have to ship with an open-source or a homegrown OS.
Reuters also said that the U.S. Department of Commerce have received about 300 such requests to do business with Huawei, and around half of those have been processed. Of the ones that have been processed, nearly half have been approved.