The guy missed one hell of a point on his resume for better part of a decade! More than that Personal satisfaction would be unimaginable given the magnitude of deployment.
Yeah, Andrew Fucking Tanenbaum needs to expand his resume.
An Open Letter to Intel
21–30 of 379 posts
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#22This "letter" smells so passive-aggressive... brr...
Sarcastic...more like ?
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#23I can't tell if this is earnest or 2nd degree. Can people more familiar with Mr Tanenbaum's style enlighten me? Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum eg…
This is earnest in that he would have liked someone from Intel to tell them.
It is completely earnest in the sense that he is not expecting any money from it. Likewise he has never expected anything from Linus Torvald when MINIX was used as the primary source of inspiration for the Linux kernel when he started out with it. Although they did have some pretty serious discussions about it, but nothing more than that.
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#24This "letter" smells so passive-aggressive... brr...
Exactly! The TLDR on it is - Intel followed the terms of the BSD license.
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#25Can't someone please find and publish a hack that allows anyone to use the Minix for his own purposes? I'd rather have a commercial antivirus vendor control my "machine in the machine" than some arbitrary 3 letter agency from a foreign country.
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#26It is interesting to see that Andrew S. Tanenbaum released this letter to the public (probably to show that he was not directly involved in deploying Minix to all those chips), while saying that he is okay with the closed source nature, as long as there are good reasons to do so (to prevent causing any problems for him and for the person who made the decision at Intel).
Hey Andrew, if you have no problem with Minix running as a spy OS inside everybody's computer, please make that clear and write:
"I appreciate Intel's use of my work to potentially backdoor everyone's systems and am proud to have had such a huge impact on the world. If it helps to keep Minix being the most used OS in the world, I hereby grant everybody (not just Intel) to use me and my work without any restriction under the terms of the BSD license."
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#27This "letter" smells so passive-aggressive... brr...
Sarcastic...more like ?
Which is part of being passive-aggressive, together with "resentment, fear of intimacy/competition"...
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#28> I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS.
I very much doubt that there's more (modern) Intel CPUs in the wild than there's say android devices (not containing Intel CPUs).
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#29I can't tell if this is earnest or 2nd degree. Can people more familiar with Mr Tanenbaum's style enlighten me? Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum eg…
It is hard to tell, but I think he might be being ironic.
Re: An Open Letter to Intel
#30> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users.
Freedom in this case should refer to "freedom what to do with the code" not freedom as in personal liberty, which is what libre/GPL software is usually about. So it's more like how the smartphones OEMs and carriers are "free" to modify and lock-down the Android OS as much as they want.