@Suiseiseki Microcode in an Intel CPU is not hardware circuits - it's software. Pretending otherwise is dishonest. When you power on an Intel CPU it runs code out of ROM that performs a series of operations (including performing cryptographic validation of other blobs) before jumping to the reset vector. And, well, good luck making the argument that there's no license associated with that - would you argue that a copy of Linux in ROM creates no GPL obligations?