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Comment by fexecve | Hacker News Reader

> You may not and you agree not to:

> publish benchmarking results about the Apple Software or your use of it

Damn, there goes my Apple Lisa vs Amiga comparison video! I was going to get so many YouTube views! Meh, maybe I'll make it anyway. So sue me!

> the Apple Software may not be exported or re-exported (a) into any U.S. embargoed countries

I'm sure keeping Iran from getting this valuable software from 1983, which runs on a completely dead CPU architecture that Linux doesn't even support anymore, is very important!

(But seriously, as a license geek, and not a lawyer, the wording of this license is really interesting. It seems to have completely different disclaimers than you usually see in open-source licenses...)

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> completely dead CPU architecture

Hey, take that back! 68k/ColdFire ISA is actually pretty well supported these days by compilers. Better than it was a few years ago. There are 68k backends for both GCC (again) and LLVM (maybe not as active).

It's probably the best supported "retro" architecture at this point.

Rest of your points are valid though ;-)

The LLVM code is fairly active for a retro arch. It just got accepted into mainline less than a couple years ago. I remember it because the m68k folk are pretty active about maintaining support for their arch in the Linux kernel, and for a while the lack of m68k support in LLVM (and therefore the lack of m68k support in Rust) was seen as a potential blocker for mainline Rust support in the kernel.

> which runs on a completely dead CPU architecture that Linux doesn't even support anymore

The 68k is hardly dead; Linux support isn't a viability indicator of an architecture. It was dropped from Linux because there are no 68k systems powerful enough to run it and it's modern userspace, so it was a waste of development and debugging time. But the architecture is thriving in embedded and custom device spaces and fully supported by GCC and LLVM.

"Thriving" is a stronger word than I'd use. NXP still manufactures a limited number of ColdFire microcontrollers, which are loosely based on the 68k architecture. But they're listed on NXP's web site under "legacy MPUs/MCUs", and many of the parts are 10+ years old and NRND. It's pretty obvious that they don't plan on continuing the product line much further than required for support lifecycles.

They're legacy in the same way z80 and MIPS are. They reached an evolutionary dead end of full feature parity for their use space. The 68k hasn't been developed further because it does everything it's target audience needs and it's power user sphere was supplanted by ARM, x86/amd64 and PPC/Power.

Sometimes, a technology is good enough and doesn't need anymore. That's the entire reason the Cortex-M (and R) series exists; because you don't need a Cortex-A715 to drive a motor and monitor a thermostat.

Even then, there's still some sustaining engineering required to maintain a design and keep it relevant. The (e)Z80s that are being made today aren't the same as the ones that were being built in the 1980s -- they're being extended with new peripherals and ported to modern fabrication technology.

I'm fairly certain that hasn't been happening with the ColdFire series. Every ColdFire part I see listed on NXP's site is from 2010 or earlier, before the Freescale acquisition. This puts a lot of those parts 2/3 or more of their way through their 15-year availability commitment; if NXP intended to keep the line alive, I'd expect to see a lot more new parts, and that isn't evident here.

(MIPS is a weird one to mention because MIPS Technologies actually declared it dead last year and started trying to rebrand themselves as a RISC-V IP core provider. The main niche that architecture was used in was wireless routers, but that's been taken over pretty thoroughly by ARM these days.)

Don't get me wrong -- I cut my teeth on 68k and I loved the architecture. But it's also clear to me that it doesn't have a future.

I’m guessing, although I don’t know, that they probably had an academic license laying around for another product that they cleaned up for this. A “it’s our source, you can use it for fun but not for money” license. Microsoft has shared source licenses for academics/bigcos that need to see the source for Windows or whatever.

It took them 4 or 5 years just to do this release, since it was first announced. I feel like "they just dusted off an old license" is not a likely explanation.

Probably took 5 years just to get through all the lawyers at Apple, and this is what we ended up with.

Remember, the default answer to almost any question poised to a lawyer is "No."

:-(

That's because you're not supposed to ask the lawyer if you should do something. You ask their boss if you can do it and ask them them how to do it.

I'm not sure why it took so long, but I think that lawyers dragging their feet probably wasn't it. I'm guessing that they would have never announced the release, unless the lawyers had already signed off on it. I think instead, it took them 5 years to make the landing page (something like this would normally take two years, but the pandemic wasted three years of that time.)

It's a fairly safe bet that the benchmarking clause was not inserted with knowledge of the Lisa and its relevance today as a historical artifact.

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