I'm a little baffled how "licenses" for instruction sets became a thing. Old CPUs, anyone could clone them or write emulators for them. There's nothing particul

I'm a little baffled how "licenses" for instruction sets became a thing. Old CPUs, anyone could clone them or write emulators for them. There's nothing particularly novel about an instruction set encoding, even if you have defined thousands of instructions, and the idea that they're worthy of patent protection (or whatever) is absurd.