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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#81

Post by ajsalminen »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
bartkappenburg wrote: post #37

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.

The last sentence is quite pretentious and completely unprovable. And if Linux had not existed we would have had GNU Hurd way earlier in all likelihood.

I think BSD taking the lead once the legal issues were resolved would have been far more likely than Hurd taking the place of Linux.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#82

Post by digi_owl »

ekianjo wrote: post #46
bartkappenburg wrote: post #37

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.

The last sentence is quite pretentious and completely unprovable. And if Linux had not existed we would have had GNU Hurd way earlier in all likelihood.

Torvalds himself seems to have claimed that had Hurd been usable back then, he would never have taken Linux as far as he did. Minix seems to have been barely on his radar, if at all.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#83

Post by dep_b »

For a while I sometimes had a thought if it were possible to put the OS completely in EFI and run an application completely in cache since both types of memory are quite big now. I mean I used to run Windows 95 with 8MB of RAM, Linux with 1MB, while a Xeon already has 16MB of cache.

That should be one hell of a fast computer

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#84

Post by simias »

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.

I don't have any problem with that.

I have a problem with Tanenbaum claiming that having Intel ask him to work for free then taking his work to implement a hardware backdoor without giving anything back (not even credit) is somehow a great thing and a proof that BSD is superior to the GPL. And that only because it means that he can say that MINIX is somehow "most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers", which, I guess, is kind of technically right. Somebody should send him a t-shirt or something.

I license my code with BSD because "I don't care what you do with it", mostly. I won't write a thank you note if some of my code ends up in some closed source product, especially something as shady as Intel's ME. And I definitely wouldn't knowingly do custom work for a company as big as Intel for free.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#85

Post by matthewmacleod »

JepZ wrote: post #68
matthewmacleod wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That whole letter is about how much better the BSD license is than the GPL. If Minux would have been GPLd Intel would have had to open source the ME and therefore didn't use e.g. Linux. I have not particular Problem with the BSD license (I use it myself sometimes) but give the facts that since years hackers are trying to convince Intel and AMD to relase their ME/PSP source code [1] (to safe us all from deeply infecta…

I don't think that Tanenbaum has any responsibility whatsoever to make that request.

The question about ME is totally, 100% orthogonal to the fact that it uses MINIX, and I'd go further and argue that this is sort of the point – releasing code as BSD is an explicit acceptance that it may be used in ways that one disagrees with.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#86

Post by therealmarv »

nah, Linus Torvalds wins. I really really doubt that Minix is more deployed than Linux... just think of three examples (and there are probably many more examples):

* Linux in all variants running in billions of VMs and Containers.

* Android.

* There are not only Intel chips out there.

So Kudos to Dr. Tanenbaum but adding all numbers I don't think we have Minix nearly as much deployed as Linux ;)

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#87

Post by Wintamute »

simias wrote: post #84
Wintamute wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have any problem with that. I have a problem with Tanenbaum claiming that having Intel ask him to work for free then taking his work to implement a hardware backdoor without giving anything back (not even credit) is somehow a great thing and a proof that BSD is superior to the GPL. And that only because it means that he can say that MINIX is somehow "most widely used operating system in the world on x86 compu…

Intel didn't ask him to work for free, read the letter again.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#88

Post by pjmlp »

delsarto wrote: post #60
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…

(Edit: removed silly comment about a personal interaction. The letter has also had addendums making the intent more clear. I will add "shut up on the internet" to the list of things I've learnt from the author) I read this as, for want of a better word, snarky. I'd bet if it wasn't Minix, L4 would have been on the cards. That's another microkernel that runs in coprocessors like your phone's radios that probably nobod…

Having met Niklaus Wirth and Richard Stallman, I know where you are coming from.

Still I do see as important to actually get to know the people behind the words.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#89

Post by rbanffy »

> this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users

I'm sorry, but I don't feel free because of that.

What I see is that I have proprietary code I never saw, never vetted and which I don't (and shouldn't) trust that's running on all my computers (not all, but you can get it) and that I don't have the freedom to remove, examine, modify or replace. There are already a lot of blobs that aren't audited by anyone outside their manufacturers running a lot of basic functionality on my computers. I don't need another blob running on god mode on my CPUs.

So, no. The use of the BSD license here is harming everyone but Intel. Hopefully, we can make it harm Intel if we make it clear (with our purchasing power) it is not cool to force us to run software we don't trust. It only serves to show that the BSD license preserves the freedom of the developers and packagers AT THE EXPENSE of the users.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#90

Post by rbanffy »

zimbatm wrote: post #59
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?

The main reason to mention GPL specifically is as a side-attack to Linux. This feud has been going on for a looong time. Finally MINIX is more popular that Linux! Never mind that it's being used as a backdoor.

As a backdoor that cannot be closed by the ordinary user.
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