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An Open Letter to Intel

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101–110 of 379 posts

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#101
post #89

> 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. Th…

This is exactly one distributing thing about GPL religion - they keep using word ‘free’ to describe one of the most restrictive open source licenses.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#102
post #89

> 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. Th…

I completely sympathise, however your argument is based on a horse that has already bolted. Un-audited binary blobs already exist and run on your computer. Now off course, there is still an argument that you may not want even more un-audited binary blobs running, but security is about the lowest common denominator. We have passed that point already. Resistance is futile!

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#103

All Dr. Tanenbaum is saying is that it would have been the classy thing to let him know, nothing more. Professor Tanenbaum is one of the most respected computer scientists alive, and for Intel to include Minix in their chip and not let him know is kind of unprofessional and not very nice to say the least. That is his only (and quite fair) point.

> and for Intel to include Minix in their chip and not let him know is kind of unprofessional and not very nice to say the least.

I guess Minix' license, which allows this kind of behaviour, is the very reason Intel chose Minix in the first place. I imagine it would be very complicated to get management approval for informing Dr. Tannenbaum about the usage in Intel's ME.

IMHO if he has a problem with the way things worked out, he should have chosen a different license. For example the MIT license requires the copyright and license to be included in distributions.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#104
post #89

> 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. Th…

You are not the user in case, Intel is.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#105

All Dr. Tanenbaum is saying is that it would have been the classy thing to let him know, nothing more. Professor Tanenbaum is one of the most respected computer scientists alive, and for Intel to include Minix in their chip and not let him know is kind of unprofessional and not very nice to say the least. That is his only (and quite fair) point.

This shows the cultural difference between private companies and scientists or open source developers.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#106
post #38
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.

> which rejects the notion that you're poorer today than yesterday just because someone started using some software you wrote.

are you arguing that we aren't all poorer with an unmodifiable black box running in our CPUs ?

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#107
post #73
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably gonna be a controversial view but my experience is this as well: Deploying GPL code is a legal process. Deploying BSD is a development process. We spent thousands of dollars on legal advice when deploying GPL. In the end it was largely as we expected it to be: No significant action was needed beyond releasing the code to the components that we already got for free, with the minor modifications we had…

I agree that many companies have that attitude towards BSD versus GPL, but is there actually a rational basis for it? Given that you've apparently already gone through the legal process and found out that the GPL means what you think it means, why are you holding it to a higher standard than BSD?

If one of your employees accidentally copies even a single bit of GPL-licensed code into your privately licensed code or statically links against such code even once, and it gets ‘outside’ in any way, you legally have to release that version of your code under the GPL. Worse, the source code of all versions from _before_ that checkin automatically become GPL-licensed (because they contain code that, transitively, becomes GPL because it later was linked with GPL-licensed software)

Yes, that may not hold up in court if it is a tiny non-essential fragment or, if you revert to old code soon, etc. but that’s not the point; if you end up in court, you already lost.

With BSD-licensed code, that risk is way smaller. The worst you have to do is add a few (or quite a few thousand. Go check Setting/General/About/Legal for an example) attribution lines to the versions of your code that use the BSD-licensed code.

(Also, even if you choose to license your code under the GPL, you have to track licensing, as it isn’t legally possible to combine GPL2 and GPLv3 or APGL and GPLv3 licenses or any GPL with ApAchexlicensed code in a single binary. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html. If you want to troll GPL aficionados, license your code under GPLv1)

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX#Relationship_with_Linux The design principles Tanenbaum applied to MINIX greatly influenced the design decisions Linus Torvalds applied in the creation of the Linux kernel.[citation needed] Torvalds used and appreciated MINIX,[17] [...] Early Linux kernel development was done on a MINIX host system, which led to Linux inheriting various features from MINIX, such as the MINIX file s…

>[citation needed]

Hilarious...

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#109
the real danger (if you can call it that) now is that, this codebase will start attracting a disproportionate number of eyeballs from security researchers to blackhats etc. everyone wants their hands on that always-on backdoor embedded in the vast majority of modern machines.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#110
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to be having a problem understanding why people would be motivated to release genuinely free software. Yes, I do have a problem understanding why people work for free. I don't see cops working for free, or bankers, or chip designers, or the guy who served my dinner working for free. Even Andrew doesn't work for free. I can understand licensing software that was built or purchased using [socialist] tax doll…

How are you paying Andrew? That makes no sense.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum works for a publicly funded (tax dollars) research university.
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