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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#131

Post by rahiel »

jhasse wrote: post #103
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #80

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 w…

The Minix 3 license contains [0]:

    * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
    notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
    documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
So it looks like Minix's license does require the copyright/license to be included in distributions.

[0]: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#132

Post by josteink »

> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users.

The Berkeley license gives software publishers (which are not users) maximum amount of freedom.

As an actual X86 user who cannot remove or change this unwanted piece of code running on my machine, I politely disagree about the freedom given to me.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#133

Post by loopbit »

Wintamute wrote: post #87
simias wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Without getting into the licence discussion:

> [...]your engineering teams contacted me about some secret internal project and asked a large number of technical questions[...].

> [...]your engineers began asking me to make a number of changes[...]

Those are two cases where Intel asked Tanenbaum to work for free. First as consultant and then implementing custom code modifications.

Yes, not many people will charge for answering questions and maybe he thought that the changes requested by the Intel engineers were appropriate and useful for the project itself, but the fact remains that this work was valuable to Intel and required Tanenbaum to spend time on it.

Edit: Formatting

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#134

Post by Fredej »

lmm wrote: post #73
Fredej wrote: 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?

The process was figuring out that we in no way mix any GPL code with our own code. As long as we don't do that it's fine but we still have to make sure every time we touch anything GPL'ed.

My personal opinion is that it's because the term 'a work' which is used liberally in GPL is a legal term and can potentially be interpreted quite broadly. This means that we have to ensure - every time - that what we do does not constitute 'a work' which derives from GPL code - in the legal sense - if we do not want to distribute the source code that we create.

With BSD we don't have to go through that process because it will not result in us losing control over our own software. We just need to stick a disclaimer in a license file and we're done.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#135

Post by josteink »

boobsbr wrote: post #104
rbanffy wrote: 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.

Intel is not the user. They are a vendor, a publisher.

By calling them "users" and saying "users have freedom" you are conflating things needlessly.

We are the users here. We severely lack freedom. (Thanks BSD!)

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#136

Post by josteink »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #91
rbanffy wrote: 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 why the GPL is so great IMO. It would force Intel to either release the source code or use something else.

It would also force Intel to give us a means to replace ME with something else which ultimately puts the user in control.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#137

Post by dhimes »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #80

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.

Exactly. When I see something that my friend has found on facebook and I share it, I always acknowledge them for finding it. It's simply intellectual honesty/courtesy. A "thank you" would have been enough. Intel goofed; hopefully they'll make amends. This has nothing to do with legal requirements or financial compensation.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#138

Post by soapdog »

jhasse wrote: post #103
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #80

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 w…

Lots of other non-GPL FOSS projects suffer a similar situation. Here in Brazil, the Lua creators having a hard time finding out who is using the language as the license permits people to pick it up, patch, distribute without ever saying "hi!". They are always quite happy when they learn about usage in the enterprise, entertaiment and other cool uses.

Companies using such projects should be more courteous, if only to encourage more of such licenses...

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#139

Post by erhardm »

samat wrote: post #101
rbanffy wrote: 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)_/¯

This is like saying North America and Europe don't have freedom because you're not free to kill/abuse/take advantage of the others however you like. Freedom doesn't work like that.

The GPL restrictions are for keeping the freedom equal for all parties involved.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#140

Post by pjmlp »

jhasse wrote: post #125
pjmlp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and easily replaceable by anything else (e.g. Fuchsia). If it's so easy, why hasn't it happen yet?

Most likely money and drivers.

Linux comes mostly for free, Fuchsia is still not mature enough and is 100% on Google's budget.

However and this is what I always raise up to people rejoicing about Linux on Android, using official Android images, there is very little Linux exposed to application writers.

The Java Frameworks are naturally kernel agnostic, and the NDK APIs are quite constrained, with the main goal of being used to implement Java native methods or bring in C or C++ code into Android.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html

https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/index.html

Anything else just isn't allowed and might kill the app as of Android 7.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/android-ch...

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/07/seccomp-fi...

Hence why Termux needs to emulate many Linux behaviors.

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