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Comment by MrMorden | Hacker News Reader

Let's look at the license (https://8th-dev.com/com-license.html):

"Except as otherwise specifically permitted in this Agreement, you may not: [...] (h) publish any results of benchmark tests run on the Software to a third party without Licensor’s prior written consent"

So we know that it's slow as crap, which is especially problematic given the author's claims of suitability for embedded development, and the author also thinks that nobody's going to notice. (What's next, an NDA to get the proposed license?) There's not a big enough cup to hold all the nope.

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Honestly, it might even be the fastest language ever, but if the license prohibits something as basic as sharing benchmarks there is something quite fishy and dystopic.

Would this be likely to hold up in court at all? It seems like this kind of thing would fall under the purview of defamation law, and benchmarks are essentially "just facts" so about as safe as you can get. I imagine they'd have to show that you maliciously construed the benchmark itself or something to make any case stick.

> Would this be likely to hold up in court at all?

Ask Oracle customers, they are tied by the same prohibition.

A license is an obligation the user falls under legally when taking official use of a software.

Sure, but licences are not free to obligate anything at all. A lincense cannot legally obligate otherwise illegal behaviour, for example. It just wouldn't hold up in court. My question is about how far licenses can circumscribe non-illegal behaviour.

There are clear pathological cases that probably wouldn't hold up in court either. What if a software contract says that you must turn over your first born child? I image that the software company would have to provide some very good reasons for including such a clause.

So, how far can a license actually go?

A lot of commercial embedded compilers have similar licenses. Even ones that e.g. have certified and published EEMBC benchmarks, so it's not so much of a red-flag as you might think.

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