[easton]

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.

[cmrdporcupine]

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."

:-(

[astrange]

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.

[fexecve]

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.)

[asveikau]

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.