Browning was a smart businessman. He never sold any of his patents. What he would do is lease a patent to one (or sometimes more) manufacturers so that they could make (whatever) firearm using that patent. Ol' JMB made his money collecting a royality on each gun that was sold.
So Browning wouldn't have put up with anyone who leased the right to use a patent, but then didn't produces any guns. I'm sure he had a back door in every agreement.
Ummmn, that's not correct.
Browning SOLD his earliest designs to Winchester. The Patents were in Brownings name, I believe, but Winchester had exclusive rights to manufacture the firearms. Winchester even told Browning to cease manufacture of his first design, the Single Shot Rife (later the Winchester 1885), after they discovered that Browning was still manufacturing small quanities from remaining parts even though he'd assigned the manufacturing rights to Winchester.
These were straight cash deals made individually for each design Browning sold to Winchester. Browning himself agreed that Winchester bought many of the designs just to keep them out of the hands of the competition and that Winchester had no intention of putting all his designs into production.
The famous split between Browning and Winchester was caused by the issue of royalties. Browning though his Auto-5 shotgun was such a revolutionary design that he wanted a royalty arrangment. Winchester would not enter into a royalty deal, so Browning made a deal that included royalties with FN instead. I believe this was his first deal with FN. He never sold another gun to Winchester after that.
So, Browning did indeed sell his designs and he did accept that some designs would never be manufactured. He later did switch to royalty payments, but not at first.
My info is from his bio, "John M. Browning - American Gunmaker."
Edit: Ok, we all said pretty much the same thing at the same time.
