Huawei has a new plan in motion to change negative perceptions of its telecom business. Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of the Chinese juggernaut, says he is open to the idea of licensing its 5G technology, including patents, to a company based in the West, The Economist reports.

The offer is a significant development at first glance, but also raises more questions and uncertainty about Huawei’s strategy. The company has been broadsided by a steady flow of prohibitive bans amid an ongoing campaign undertaken by the U.S. government to diminish its role in telecom networks around the globe. Huawei is desperate to change global perceptions of its business.

Huawei’s open-ended pitch, as summarized by The Economist, would for a one-time fee give a licensee in the West perpetual access to its existing 5G patents, licenses, code, technical blueprints, and production know-how. How that would actually play out is very much up for debate.

Huawei is “open to sharing our 5G technologies and techniques with U.S. companies so that they can build up their own 5G industry,” Ren told The New York Times, but he added, “the U.S. side has to accept us at some level for that to happen.”

“The big question is: who’s going to take them up on it?” Daryl Schoolar, principal analyst at Ovum, told SDxCentral. “I don’t think Nokia and Ericsson are at all potentials. The fact is I don’t think anybody is going to take Huawei up on this. I don’t see really a great path forward for anybody. I think the best bet could be something like a Facebook or maybe Google buys it and turns it into open source for smaller vendors as a way to maybe get cheaper gear out there.”

William Ho, founder and principal analyst at 556 Ventures, cited Nokia and Ericsson as possible interested parties but largely because there’s so few companies that could gain from such an arrangement and spin up a new manufacturing line of 5G network equipment.

If Huawei’s offer actually leads to its publicly stated outcome, it would be a completely new and unproven development for the wireless infrastructure space, according to Schoolar. Many technology companies license their intellectual property to other companies but in almost every scenario that technology targets a market that the licensor is not directly involved in at scale, he explained.

“It’s really unusual to see a company say ‘we will license our entire solution but we’re going to continue to build our own and actively go after those markets ourselves.’ So that’s unusual,” Schoolar said.

“Anybody else who’s already got a 5G radio portfolio, you’re going to be having to make decisions on which portfolio to support and which one you don’t,” he added. “Does it really change your position competitively? Because it’s not like you’re getting Huawei out of the market. You’re just giving Huawei more money…It doesn’t do Nokia and Ericsson any good because they’re going to get everywhere Huawei can’t go without Huawei’s [intellectual property rights].”

Huawei’s proposition is very much tied to its ongoing and widening challenges in Western markets. The U.S. government and some allies have accused Huawei of espionage, intellectual property theft, sanction violations, and a disturbing level of security vulnerabilities in its software. Huawei has steadfastly denied all wrongdoing and filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government in March to challenge a ban on its equipment.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in May that invoked national emergency powers to “deal with the threat posed” by IT and telco technology owned by foreign adversaries, and the Commerce Department has taken the lead in instituting a blanket ban against Huawei working with U.S. companies. However, the agency has since issued two temporary 90-day reprieves that effectively allow some rural network operators and other U.S. businesses to continue doing business with Huawei.

Getting around Huawei’s unresolved security issues — whether perceived or real —  is still a big unknown.

If a company decides to make a deal with Huawei “it could pass the sniff test in the Western world, but the bigger question is even if you have this know-how it takes a lot of scale to really support network deployments. And there just aren’t a lot of companies out there that could do it,” Schoolar said.

“The devil’s in the details,” Ho said. “If it’s out in the open, and a Western company owns it and they can manipulate the code and extract whatever, I think that’s kind of to say it’s transparent, it’s out there in the open, you can examine it, you change it, because you’re going to ultimately own it.”

From that perspective, Huawei could claim greater transparency around its code but also earn itself a one-time sale that monetizes its intellectual property while maintaining its position as a global player, Ho explained. “They’re kind of desperate in a way… In my view it’s protecting future revenue and they want to be relevant in the global play,” he said.

But mostly, Huawei is just trying to earn some goodwill amid a widening trade war with China and a direct battle with the U.S. government that has been unrelenting, according to Schoolar.

“It seems to be more of a political position than anything else,” he said. “I don't see who is going to take them up on it. I think it’s more political posturing as a way of saying ‘hey, we’re willing to be flexible and work with you guys however you want to.”