Intel Clears Up Microcode Licensing Controversy - Simpler License, Allows Benchmarking

[Guest]

Ugh, lawyers. You always need to keep the legal team on a tight leash.

[howarth]

The rumor seems to be that this is related to the latest microcode changes disabling hyper threading to protect against the Foreshadow exploit.

[hgoldfish]

Is the link of new license broken?

[ids1024]

Shouldn't be legal to write stuff like this

It's standard language in closed source software. It isn't surprising to see in microcode. Reverse engineering for "interoperability" is protected, but it's not clear what counts. I would hope there's some protection for security research, but I'm not aware that there is.

The Atari v. Nintendo court case is an interesting one relating to reverse engineering.

[sunweb]

Where is the original article about Benchmark's Bans? Its similar to Nvidia's situation. When they *ucked up you didn't write anything, like it never happened. Now when Intel fixed it you wrote about it. Journalism ain't the same anymore...

[Michael]

Where is the original article about Benchmark's Bans?

I knew it was going to be rectified so had to wait until it actually was to report on it rather than just spreading news that wasn't entirely accurate.

[Guest]

Man, the kinds of things people obsess about... If it says "GNU" before "Linux", if it's GPL2 or GPL3, if the proprietary software is in the repo or outside or if there's an alert when you install the OS, etc etc. Can you imagine if all this energy was put into making distros betters, writing newer better GUI toolkits and better apps using said toolkits?

[GrayShade]

Michael will you run some benchmarks on the new version?

[chilinux]

"but knew would be corrected"

How did you know that? Imad Sousou's (the guy that tweets as "#IAmIntel" because he is a VP/GM) statements to The Register on Tuesday seems to make clear he had no intention of correcting it.

"didn't feel like reporting the hype train"

"Following all of the public attention and pressure, Intel was quick to clear up the situation. "

If it takes reporting on the situation to get Intel to clear up the problem, is it really fair to reduce the reporting to being a "hype train"?

Anyone that has talked with Randal Schwartz (one of the top experts in Perl) about Intel knows that when Intel releases "some overzealous Intel legal folks" on someone that REALLY BAD things happen. Taking care of this sooner instead of later was kind of critical given what was implied by the license was highly restrictive (the open ended reference to "benchmark" may have also included prohibiting code profiling) and was holding up critical security patches to Debian users. Once Bruce Perens posts about an issue to his blog, it usually is safe to say that other options to communicate with Intel has been exhausted.

I really highly recommend doing an interview with Randal Schwartz. If you do, I would then ask that you please reconsider your position to what degree the community/press should be cautious about Intel using overly broad legal language and the degree Intel needs to be called out when they do. They are powerful enough that even little "mistakes" have a huge impact.

[Michael]

Michael will you run some benchmarks on the new version?

It's my goal for this weekend.