Timely, the first new beta in years just came out. There's a lot more content to go before it's a complete game, but there's lot of fun to be had. Contributions welcome!
This is like the circle of life for startups, I swear. Next up will be "legal services for someone interfering with your disruptive business model as a service".
Unfortunately, the First Amendment does not protect against private action, only government restraints on speech. Other mechanisms like anti-SLAPP laws might help with that, but either way that's a lot of legal effort to publish some benchmarks. Intel also operates all over the world, so they could eg. sue a Britain-based branch of some media outlet that also publishes the numbers if the laws there are more in their favor.
The license can't restrict third parties from sharing benchmarks, which is why it puts the onus on the user not to allow third parties to share them. If some news site was to publish benchmarks without disclosing the source, Intel would first have to take them to court to force them to disclose who provided said benchmarks. That's as far as I can see it directly impacting sites that don't run their own benchmarks. That said, the sites that do run their own benchmarks would be on the hook. Sadly, even if this is unenforceable, the potential legal battle to have it declared so would be scary enough to quash some criticism.
This really makes me doubt if I should buy Intel products in the future (to the extent that I have a choice). If I can't get performance information because Intel has something to hide, I'll have to look elsewhere. Really, this is sufficiently distasteful behavior to make me avoid Intel even if the products work just fine.
I see it as a step towards integrating more (or in this case better IMO) things into their ecosystem. Consolidating Hipchat with Slack is a step toward that.
True. REAMDE (same author) is more on the nose, but I also didn't enjoy it as much as a book. Really, Neal Stephenson just doesn't do books with only one major focus.
Explicit probably saves a lot of time in court, and helps with global consistency. More importantly, Apache 2 and GPL 3 include reciprocal patent grants. They work similarly to the React patent grant, but unlike that one they go both ways. In the React one, only you lose access to the patents if you sue Facebook, but Facebook can sue you fine even if you contributed to React. Under Apache 2 and GPL 3, no one contributing to the software can sue anyone for patents infringed as a result without having their license revoked in its entirety (copyright AND patent).
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That's a fair guess. It was more a "maybe some of them want time off without getting above average interview offer spam". Overall I think it's a good thing too.