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But at the end of the day who would have given a shit about the license on a cpu? It would have been ignored.
People who play by the rules in this space, which includes (many) open source developers. Flaunting the ill-conceived license is one choice, getting it fixed is a better choice.
How do you gaffe this bad? How is someone that incompetent in the decision making loop? Some random engineer creating the ucode or uploading it to the web doesn't come up with this kind of idea to change license language. These are edicts from management. I'd love for that conversation to leak in full.
Companies like IBM or Oracle have had these clauses for decades to prevent users from comparing performance. Such EULA clauses need to be put to the test and overturned for the anti-consumer monopolistic garbage they are.
This seems like someone testing the waters. I fear as they fall further behind the behaviour may become more desperate.
I think Hanlon's razor is more correct here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
No explanations, no apologies, just this: We are updating the license now to address this and will have a new version available soon. As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback.
IIRC, at the time they talked about the delivery of the initial patches for Meltdown and Spectre, Intel's definition of "soon" was somewhere between "4 weeks" and "never"
From a legal point of view can you limit free speech through a end user license agreement? Free speech is protected by the first amendment, many countries basic legal laws. If some challenged it and it went to the high court how would it likely judge?
Think NDAs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That language is likely derived from a path similar to this: "Marketing department" -- We are sick of seeing the world complain that our patches to these problems reduce performance by X percent. Hey "Legal Dept", can anything be done about that? "Legal Dept" -- We will see what we can do... Result, a new clause appears in the license file that says "no bench-marking". With no one in the path ever having heard of the…
I suspect its something more banal. I believe intel does distribute test/beta microcode to certain partners, and likely security researchers, this kind of statement is something you would put in a beta version, I wonder if someone simply used the wrong license file when they deployed this to the website.
How do you gaffe this bad? How is someone that incompetent in the decision making loop? Some random engineer creating the ucode or uploading it to the web doesn't come up with this kind of idea to change license language. These are edicts from management. I'd love for that conversation to leak in full.
I saw a tweet somewhere (IIRC in the anandtech sidebar, unfortunately I'm not finding it right now) where the poster speculated that it was the EULA for a beta version of the microcode which leaked into the final version.
https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1032546813176307712
and if it was true they would have said so in their reply.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Hanlon's razor is more correct here. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
"I", as a multinational multi billion dollar corporation could then carry out the most vile acts, but as long as I can feign 'oops' I ought never be held to account as if my acts had intent? I mean come on, they're killing their processor performance due to their own security vulnerabilities and oopsie daisy we just accidentally included a 'no benchmarking' clause? I've got a better razor for - Occam's.
From a legal point of view can you limit free speech through a end user license agreement? Free speech is protected by the first amendment, many countries basic legal laws. If some challenged it and it went to the high court how would it likely judge?
Free speech is a protection that the government can't take away, but you can give it away of your own volition. Think NDAs.