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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#31

Post by matthewmacleod »

Radim wrote: post #6
tarruda wrote: post #4

> when companies have told me that they hate the GPL because they are not keen on spending a lot of time, energy, and money modifying some piece of code, only to be required to give it to their competitors for free Some piece of code that also cost time (and possibly someone's else money) to develop, and that they got for free?

This struck me as bizarre as well. You're thanking someone because you relicensed your hard work so they can use it for free (BSD) and you complied? All for the stated reason that they don't have to relicense their work to other people so they could use it for free? /facepalm It's like some version of the Stockholm syndrome, deserves a name.

I don't think there's any implication that MINIX was relicensed specifically for Intel.

I'm surprised how much difficulty some people have in understanding that others might make different licensing choices. If I license software under a BSD/MIT-like license, it's not an accident – it's specifically done so that there are as few restrictions on that software as possible.

Don't get me wrong – the GPL is important and making the choice to license under it is a totally legitimate personal choice with various pros and cons versus a BSD license. But it's not the only rational choice to make, and I wish you'd be a bit more open-minded about that.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#32

Post by sgift »

mk89 wrote: post #27
cee_el1234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcastic...more like ?

Which is part of being passive-aggressive, together with "resentment, fear of intimacy/competition"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive-aggressive_behavior

Which are all just your interpretation of his post.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#33

Post by imron »

mfukar wrote: post #21
ramshanker wrote: post #10

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.

If for nothing else that he now gets bragging rights over Linux

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#34

Post by JepZ »

amelius wrote: post #5
arximboldi wrote: post #2

> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users. Interesting conclusion, considering one of the "features" of the Intel ME is precisely to limit what the final user can do with their computer.

Yes. And it also allows others (e.g. the three-letter agencies) to spy on the user. I wonder how Tanenbaum feels about all that.

He is so aroused, he doesn't feel much else ;-)

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#35

Post by matthewmacleod »

JepZ wrote: post #26

It 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 r…

That's an absolute non-sequitur and I think you know that.

There is no reason that MINIX could not have been used in the ME even if it were GPLd, for example…

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#36

Post by pjmlp »

popee wrote: post #16

And now I'm happy that Linux won

Won what?

- Being the kernel of ChromeOS and Android, not accessible to majority of userspace and easily replaceable by anything else (e.g. Fuchsia).

- Lost to macOS and Windows on the desktop

It only won on the server room, and now it runs under Minix supervision.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#37

Post by bartkappenburg »

From his CV:

One of the early users of MINIX was Linus Torvalds. He began modifying MINIX to add new features that he thought were needed. Over a period of time he had modified almost everything and launched it as a new operating system, Linux. It is fairly safe to say that had I not written MINIX there would have been no Linux.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#38

Post by avar »

simias wrote: post #11

I 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…

Of course it's earnest. If it wasn't he wouldn't have picked the BSD license, which rejects the notion that you're poorer today than yesterday just because someone started using some software you wrote.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#39

Post by tgragnato »

Wintamute wrote: post #13
Radim wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This struck me as bizarre as well. You're thanking someone because you relicensed your hard work so they can use it for free (BSD) and you complied? All for the stated reason that they don't have to relicense their work to other people so they could use it for free? /facepalm It's like some version of the Stockholm syndrome, deserves a name.

You seem to be having a problem understanding why people would be motivated to release genuinely free software. Open source can mean complete freedom, including the freedom to take the software, modify it, gain a competitive advantage and generate economic value, according to the license choice of the original author.

There's not an absolute in licensing; it depends on what your thoughts and motivations are.

In practise, seeing ME as a competitive advantage is something that's at least questionable.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#40

Post by zouhair »

Radim wrote: post #6
tarruda wrote: post #4

> when companies have told me that they hate the GPL because they are not keen on spending a lot of time, energy, and money modifying some piece of code, only to be required to give it to their competitors for free Some piece of code that also cost time (and possibly someone's else money) to develop, and that they got for free?

This struck me as bizarre as well. You're thanking someone because you relicensed your hard work so they can use it for free (BSD) and you complied? All for the stated reason that they don't have to relicense their work to other people so they could use it for free? /facepalm It's like some version of the Stockholm syndrome, deserves a name.

It's not free, it's Free

http://wiki.c2.com/?FreeAsInBeer

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